I’m looking to maybe buy a car about 2 hours away from home and it’s really cheap partly because the alternator belt snapped and hasn’t gotten replaced yet.
I saw two options:
- Bring the belt and install it before the long drive (Never owned that model before so I am not 100% confident that I could successfully do that)
- Bring multiple car batteries for the ride home (would be super expensive)
Then I realized that since we’ll be two cars driving back home, why not stop every X amount of time and switch the batteries between the two cars to keep one of them charged. I have a portable car booster which would come in handy if we mess it up.
Am I crazy and lying to myself right now or does this sound feasible to you guys?
My dad and I did this bringing my Rx7 home, years ago.
Alternator belt broke 5 minutes after pickup, so we had to just pull over whenever the battery ran out. Then parked my mum’s car facing the Rx7 and hooked up the jumper cables and let it charge for 10 minutes. 12 jumps later, we were home.
Good times.
Bring the belt. You’ll make it halfway before you find out that the healthy car cannot recharge the battery quickly enough.
We did this once with 2 classic Wolseley Hornet cars, we were going to a show and one had a charging system failure, that was about 50 miles and it was snowing just to add a next level of pain the ass. A few times we had to bump start the one with the flat battery as it wouldn’t quite crank the starter enough.
Does this alternator belt also spin the water pump? If so don’t even think about it, can’t drive a car with a water pump that doesn’t pump. It will immediately overheat and blow up.
But if this belt only runs the alternator from the crank, then yes this would work.