wwb114

Well, I figured it out. Due to not being able to find this specific setup anywhere online, I'll keep this post up for anyone as lost as I was on my first belt change. The top pulley is the tensioner pulley. I was able to do this change alone without jacking up the car and without removing the wheel. It did help to have the wheel turned hard right. You must remove the plastic fender liner by taking about some plastic clips and 4 or 5 screws. The screws are located underneath the nose of the car and take a 7mm socket. After this, you must remove the front 4 plastic clips from the plastic shielding the inside of the wheel; this entire piece of plastic does not need to come off. To keep the belt loose, I used a 15mm wrench rather than a socket and rotated it counter-clockwise. There are some bolts nearby I used to keep the wrench in place by looping a zip-tie around the wrench and the nut on one of these bolts. This worked very well. After that, I easily removed the old belt, and with a little poking and prodding I was able to get the new one on. Overall this was not very difficult at all. I think doing it a second time could take as little as an hour realistically. Hopefully this helps someone who was in the same boat as I!

I have recently picked up a 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid and had a shop take a look at it before purchasing. The one thing they strongly recommended doing before any prolonged trips was to replace the belt. As I have not dealt with belt replacements before, I scoured the internet trying to figure out which pulley is the tensioner pulley but I have been unable to discover which one it is for the hybrid model. Now, there are only 3 pulleys in this system so I tried manipulating all of them. I'm not sure how much force is needed to move the tensioner, but I felt zero give on any of them. The middle pulley in the diagram has smooth, rounded edges with no lip and has the outside of the belt resting on it, so one thought I had was that the belt simply slides around that pulley after being put on the other two pulleys. The included diagram is taken from the manual. Thanks for any help/guidance.