Tiburon Timing Belts for Dummies

Tiburon timing belt routing

It is sometimes instructive to wander through the archived versions of eHow.com posts to see if anyone has commented on the content (in other words, beat us to the punch). Every once in a while we find evidence that other people are thoroughly disgusted by the rubbish some of their freelancers published either out of ignorance or avarice – and perhaps both. Today, we visit a post written by prolific eHowian Abby Vaun that now sits at the niche site ItStillRuns.com. Like so many of the posts at that site, we suspect that anyone ignorant enough to follow the instructions in "How to Replace the Timing Belt on a 2003 Hyundai Tiburon" would soon find that their car did not "still run."

Vaun's "answer" consisted of ten steps. Based on that alone, we knew that she was tossing around the proverbial bull, since we found a DIY website that covered the same project and required almost 40 steps, none of which was Vaun's step number 1:

"Raise the passenger side of the car with the jack. Position the jack so that it is under the front axle..."

...which raised a red flag for us, since few (if any) modern cars are designed to be jacked from under the axle (jack stands, yes; jacks generally fit under a reinforced point on the frame). We were also taken aback by Abby's instruction to,

"Take the old timing belt off of the alternator pulley..."

...because we, unlike Vaun, know that a timing belt doesn't run the alternator. It may run the water pump, depending on the vehicle (see image above), but the alternator? naaahhhh...

Sure enough, buried at archive.org's Wayback Machine, we found a version of this post from that had the following comment dated August 29, 2011 (and missing from later archived versions...):

"I don't know who wrote this but they are wrong that is how you replace a serpentine belt not a timing belt there is a huge difference."

The run-on sentence notwithstanding, we suspected exactly that; and it isn't the first time we've run across some idiot eHow freelancer who didn't know the difference between a serpentine belt and a timing belt. Suffice it to say, we were not amused – and we'll be looking for more Dumbass of the Day candidates from Vaun's keyboard.

Something tells us this won't be the last...

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