TD4 Aux Belt Won't Fit

****e I might have accidentally deleted the post, but anyhoo, what you were doing with the 15mm spanner is right. Get the 15mm on the back and hold it securely, then get the spanner on the 24mm bolt on the pulley face and tighten, ( anti clockwise if I remember right) and keep going until its tight. You should then find your tensioner will work normally and you will clearly see correct movement back and forth against the spring. No doubt what you are seeing just now is the tensioner moving slightly then coming back to its original position despite you holding the spanner still. Obviously the more attempts youve had at backing off the tensioner, the slacker this bolt will now be. Best of luck.

Musky - Will give the tightening thing another shot tomorrow (not going back to my mates tonight, sick of the sight of the bottom of that engine!) but last time we did it, it was as tight as it would go and we were just starting to round the 24mm bolt.

With another foot long spanner on the foot long 24mm spanner, that was a hell of a lot of leverage we were putting on it and it wasn't getting much tighter. Much more and we risked shearing the bolt or rounding the head.

Skinny Mike (incidentally my name is also Mike, and I bet I'm skinnier than you are) - Didn't realise you'd actually taken that picture, just thought you'd pulled it up from a Google search, so thank you for going to that effort. Indeed, thank you to everyone for going to the effort of replying to this thread.

Its no trouble really. Plus being abused turns me on
Mike

Binaryfinary sorry if I missed part about you already tightening. Its always better havingtime away from these things anyway. When it happened to me I stopped for a cuppa and to clean my bleeding knucklesthen went back out and got it right away. Make sure 15mm spanner is properly located and you are turning 24mm correct direction....same as to slacken tensioner, im 99% its anti clockwise. Its not as easy as I make it sound, its fiddly and a pig to get at. Without this problem my belt would have been done in 30 mins instead of 3 hours.

binary, like i said you most probably fooked up in your first attempt to get the belt on and broke the tensioner,
anyways , you will have to remove it , , when refitting i found it easier to restrain the spanner on the tensioner bolt with a tie down strap, then you can release it under control when you have the belt correctly routed,

Poxy job that is