WEELLLL.................................... in 1 week... first my brake line... then my water pump, yesterday my alternator. EVERYTHING repaired individually!! AND JUST AFTER I INSTALL MY ALTERNATOR, my tensioner goes! I'm assuming it's dying since it's squealing like hell. This is probably caused by being handled so much lately. At least this is a fast repair and hopefully cheap!! I swear, if something else goes like my starter or A/C, selling the truck before it becomes a real disaster.

For a tensioner, should the whole assembly be replaced or only the pulley?

 

Both of the times i got mine at the parts store it came as the whole assembly. I didnt even check to see if you could get just the pulley.

 

if its squeaking then its probably just the bearings in the pulley that are going bad. you can buy it either way, but for the price difference i would just replace the whole thing. that way you have a nice fresh tensioner and wont have to worry about it losing tension later down the road.

 

I have a nice low mileage tensioner I'll sell you PM me if interested. It doesn't have more than a couple thousand miles on it.

 

Just for future reference, yes you can buy just the pulley from any parts store. Hell you could even reuse the pulley and replace the bearing, but the cost difference isn't really worth the trouble.

 

Well, the store i went to sold both of them separately, I got a pulley only as my tensioner was good. The old pulley would make screechy sounds until i'd put wd-40 on it, then it would go away for 10 secs before coming back gradually. So, after replacing the pulley, the sound kept going.

Turns out that the sound is caused by the washer holding the pulley. It became a bit warped due to a bit of rust and is scraping the plastic counterpart on the pulley. Just need to find a new washed of endure the sound.