Help! Belt/Pulley high-pitched whine WITH SOUND

[///MptyPockets]

OMG! This just started happening to me tonight on my way home. It is spot on the EXACT same sound. So you're thinking alternator? Have you replaced it yet? How long have you been driving it like this? Should I not drive my car? If it's just a bad bearing it doesn't sound all that bad, but if it siezed up then that could potentially be bad far from home...

Any luck with fixing the problem?

-Derrick

[themightyquinn]

Hey man, I've actually been driving around with it like this for awhile...it's just gotten louder and more obnoxious over time. I'm fairly certain it IS the alternator bearing, but as long as your alternator is still working it should be fine to drive (you'll just have to deal with the noise).

I recently looked for a used alternator on car-part.com, and found one in good condition for around $55 shipped...so it's not expensive to fix.

I've having some weird coolant-leaking/engine overheating problems, so the car's in the shop and I'm gonna get my mechanic to check out everything else wrong with the car and let me know. When I hear what he says I'll post it up.

[CirrusSR22]

My alternator failed a year ago and I bought a brand new Valeo one from AutohausAZ. It had an electical whine from day one. I was going to retrun it ASAP, but it was cold out, and I was busy, so I left it and got used to the nose.

Just last week I got sick of it and returned it under warranty and bought a remanufactured Valeo alternator from "California Alternator and Starter" (eBay) for $99. It is about 5x quieter than the the brand new Valeo it replaced! I'm so happy with it. My car idles SO much quieter now. The remanufactuer alternator looks 100% new.

[TI-driftin]

Originally Posted by themightyquinn

Hey man, I've actually been driving around with it like this for awhile...

Did you get this fixed yet? im curious what it is. Your probably right its probably the alternator but the first thing i said when you started your car up was "power steering". You checked the fluid, right?

[CaribTi]

I can barely sort out the noise in the vids; however I had a weird whine noise on my Ti a while ago. I verified almost every moving part in the engine. After months of living with the noise I finally nailed it down to the PC-valve. To check for this all you need to do is to open (just a bit) the valve cover oil cap. If the noise goes away you have a bad PCV and its corresponding hose. The bad PCV creates tons of pressure in your engine until the hose that connects the valve cover and the PCV tears, the air leaking from this hose makes the whining noise.

[spidertri]

Just as a follow up to this thread, I helped Quinn change out his cooling stuff and belt tensioner. His noise was the serpentine belt tensioner, after it was replaced the noise was gone.

When we got the belts off we spun the tensioner and it moaned and groaned something terrible. Needless to say, he is very happy to have that problem fixed.