Technical JTD alternator pulley failure

[frogger]

hi,
I've had an intermittent squeak/ rattle sound coming from around the Aux. belt area, so I though it was caused by the seemingly common failure of the crank pulley and/or the belt tensioner...so I went and ordered them (£130 including new bolts) with the idea of replacing them this weekend.
got a call from the missus this afternoon telling me she is broken down on the M3 with alternator light on. we got the car towed home and there I was thinking that all i need to do is replace the bits I already had (pulley+tensioner). But as it turned out the cause of failure was the freewheeling style alternator pulley 'sheared' off'.
I did some quick searching on this forum and hunted some prices on the web for new alternator and ended up ordering from local Fiat dealer. £200 + VAT. i also enquired about fitting (after reading about the replacement on this forum and deciding not to tackle the replacement myself) they quoted me 2.5 h @ £80/hour
called around the local garages and managed to get the labour down to £80 even so i'm still looking at close to 400 quid and the missus will miss 3 days work.
on the hindsight maybe I should have done some better fault finding, instead of just assuming what the fault was.

 

[martyc5674]

Good deal on the labor...gettin the alternator out is no mean feat!!
Still you'd have had to replace the alternator anyways so count yourself lucky the belt didn't take out the timing belt as it almost did on mine.
Stick on the new pulley and tensioner and if I were you new idler pulley aswell as this was thr cause ofine coming off.
Ended up needing new timing belt casings .. So did the belt aswell as a lot if the aux belt bits ended up
inside the timing belt covers and on inspection had
embedded themselves into the belt!
Marty.