Three6GMC,

I see you live in Corpus. It's not that close, but it's not an unreasonable distance to come to Houston/Pearland area. I'd be more than willing to see if I can maybe find something wrong with your set up so that you can keep the spring loaded tensioner on the truck.

I don't know how much you follow any of the stuff that I do, but I take a very methodical approach to everything I work on. In the case of serpentine belt driven blowers, it pays to be methodical.

Anyway, let me know if you'd like some help. I'd like to take a crack at it, just for the sake of being able to back up what I am posting here.

 

I had the same problem with my turbo setup wanting to throw the belt. Installed the katech tensioner and it was fixed after that and nothing failed.

 

You went to the manual tensioner? How do you like it?

 

I did. It worked and never had any issues with it except when I forget to extra tighten it one time. I also never figured out why I started throwing belts though.

 

Manual tensioner on a turbo set up is different ball game.

 

I tried the manual tensioner route with my V7ysi/10 rib. I could not get it to work. Luckily my dad had an extra Hellcat tensioner at the shop from one of his projects. He made a simple adapter bracket and no more belt issues. The stock tensioner was too week for the load that the supercharger put on it. I tried different brands of stock tensionsers. Some would work for a little while, and some would throw the belt immediately.

 

You know his truck is TT right??

 

Well got the Katech tensioner in and installed today when I got out of work. I have yet to go try it out other then idle and revving but does seem ALOT more solid. One thing I noticed on the stock tensioner was that with the two mounting locations and the big offset it has off the water pump the tensioner would flex front to back with a tight belt. The Katech tensioner uses a third mounting location right above the thermostat housing which makes it really ridged. On my next days off I'll go do some pulls and see how it does.

 

Not sure if I posted this but went back with a weatherproof relay on the fuel pump and cleaned up the installation. Also fuel pump is running great, have yet to have any flow drop off or any kind of starvation issues even down to a ⅛ of tank. I normally don't run my truck under a ¼ tank but was just curious to see how low I can get the fuel level before the pump goes dry.

 

Hope that tensioner does the job. Excited to see what your truck can do once the traction bugs are worked out.