Strange noise from engine..."Whirling" sound
This is for a 2015 Thor Majestic 28a Class C RV with a Ford e450 V10 engine. It is a previous rental. I've owned it for about 30,000 miles and it now has 140,000 miles on it. Back in Feb 2021 I had...
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SJ-Chris wrote:30sweeds wrote:
One of the belt idler or tensioner pulleys going bad.If that is the case,it's cheap and easy enough to fix but complete failure will leave you stranded.
When these start to fail (idler or tensioner), does it make sense that the sound happens from a cold start and goes away in 2-3 minutes? Maybe the bearings are starting to go and once they start rotating via the belt they quickly heat up and it makes the whirling sound go away????
I was just chatting with my neighbor who is MUCH more mechanically inclined than I am. I told him my issue. He immediately thought (before I even said it) it could very likely be the idler pulley or tension pulley. He said that when they get old or start to fail, sometimes the bearing grease starts getting hard (when the engine cools). Then, from a cold start there is momentarily rubbing that takes place (...like for a couple minutes) and eventually they heat up and it melts the grease and then the whirling sound goes away. Sounds VERY consistent with my symptoms.
I watched some youtube videos and it seems easy enough to change the idler pulley and tension pulley so I'm going to try to do that now and see if that fixes the problem. I'll let you know what happens.
-Chris
