Name: 2nd Gen Mini Cooper "bad engine noises" diagnosis.
Uploaded: 2025-02-21T21:37:19.000Z
Duration: 3 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Today, we are going to diagnose a terrible sound on a Mini Cooper.

Hey, you know, those Mini Coopers are terrible cars, they make all kinds of racket.

Oh, that's the timing chain, that's no good.

Oh my gosh, have you checked your oil lately?

First thing you must do is remove this inner fender liner out of the way.

This is done by simply removing this lower splash shield.

It's held in with some Phillips screws, and then you got our lovely friends.

The old push pins for which you just kind of need a pick and a tool and a screwdriver.

And here's the culprit, there is chunks missing from the drive belt.

To inspect the drive belt, simply install a 19mm socket onto the end of the crank pulley and turn clockwise with a breaker bar.

Why is this a problem and why does it make noise?

Well, it makes noise because the friction wheel runs up here and drives the water pump right up there.

And because the belt has a gap in it, when it comes around to this position, it collapses, pushes like up against this drive gear or the friction wheel, and that noise gets transferred to this unit.

Now, you can check this because there is a pull tab here, you pull this tab out, releases the friction wheel, there's a small hook to hold the friction wheel in place so it does not reset.

You can now manually spin the friction wheel and carefully inspect it for damage.

Let's see it with the friction wheel disengaged, the tab pulled and held in the lock position.

We're going to re-engage the friction wheel and see how much worse this sounds.

Now here's the thing, I know that that friction wheel is not bad because when I have it released and I spin it, it feels fine, there's no chunks, I've inspected the water pump drive, it's a nice solid piece of rubber with no chunks of rubber missing.

The problem on this car is simply the drive belt.

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