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After my Winter car sits through the summer, it squeals at start-up for a few minutes. After a 1-2 drives, the squeal at start-up is gone.
(I put comments from 2 of your posts at bottom). I'm wondering if there is a some cause & effect, as follows.
1. The PO parked the car because of "charging problems". This could be a combo of: the bad ground Onkel suggests, a failing alternator/ brushes, and the excite wire shorting out. If the alternator is getting weak/ intermittent ground, it would be struggling to produce enough to keep the battery up.
I'm in over my head here but: With a partial ground, there's a voltage drop to the circuit. The voltage regulator sees low voltage and asks for more => a high load constantly. The belts squeal in response. Electrical resistance produces heat which damages the ground wire/ connector and perhaps the excite wire.
2. They parked the car after a drive in Winter w/ salted roads. It sat, the pulleys rusted up. When I posted about the rough pulleys earlier, someone said that usual problem was pulleys that were too smooth. These were rough with scale and the belts were trying to grab on the scale - it almost looked like a frame treated with POR-15.
The high electrical load in a 240 hadn't occurred to me (your comment that the 2 belts were needed to handle high-output alternators) - I thought the (2) 240 belts were for redundancy. I rarely had belt squeal in the older (1960s-70s) cars I had but these didn't have computers, electric fuel pumps, CD-stereo ...
Net: I'll remove and clean the crank pulley in case it has more rust than I can see with it on the car; I'll replace the belts with wider ones if I have them.
The new belts I have could have been on a shelf a long time. Belts have a shelf life as well as a working life.
AB: "I would never look to a broken ground wire, as the squeal corresponds with the effective re-charging of the battery just drained in cranking. Although it could be a contributor if the battery never does get recharged because the ground is intermittent. When I say broken, I mean in the fashion Onkel describes, where the connection is poor in one of the ring lugs, not cut in two obvious pieces."
AB: "The two-belt system is not a redundancy move. These cars need every bit of both belts to grab that tiny alternator pulley with what little wrap the three-point geometry gives. The matched belt obsession is made moot by the variation in tensioning vs. the oil-soaked mounting bushings found in cars 20 and 30 years on the road. The later 80A alternators do offer quite a bit of resistance bringing up a battery from cranking discharge.
All my kids know to turn off the lights (and blower) until the squealing stops, when this does occur. Saves me embarrassment."
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240 drivers / parts cars - JH, Ohio
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