some car trouble

[86Zman]

Hello All. Im preping my car for weeking away from home. I need to get it in shape before i leave. I have a loose belt which i think is the Alt. belt. At low RPMs i can hear a belt slipping (squeeling) then i rev the engine and it goes away. also i put in coolant about 2 weeks ago and i checked the coolant level today and it seemed to have dropped by about 1/4. Not sure if its because its circulating or because of a leak (New to cars, so bear with me please). Let me know if you have any ideas.

[Hodo]

Ok the belt does sound like its loose. When was the last time it was changed, if it has been more than 60K miles change it. Along with the timing belt and all the other belts while your there. As for your coolant problem it could be any number of things. The most common of which at that age is a cracked hose, check for signs of coolant leaking fron the lower and upper hoses to the radiator, they could be REALLY small so look for this white crusty build up around the connection points on the hoses. Also if you have access to a pressure tester you could pressurize your coolant system to about 30PSI and look for leaks, by watching the gauge if it drops more than 5PSI in 15min then you have a leak somewhere. Then it would be kinda easy to find becuase it would be dribbling out of the place its leaking.

Hope that helps a bit.

[DeleriousZ]

yeah, a nice and quick easy fix for the alternator belt would be to tighten it up a bit using the tensioner... which on an 86 n/a z is... on the drivers side underneath the alternator... just looks like a long threadded bolt with a chunk of the alternator support bolted to it... as for the coolant... when are you checking the levels? if you're checking the extra reservoir when it's cold it will have more in there... so i'm assuming you added more whilst the car was cold, and you might have checked it again when the engine was warm, so there should be less coolant in there...

you'd know if you had a leak most likely... look for puddles under the car (obviously) and you can also take off the splash guard on the bottom of the car underneath the front part of the engine bay to see if there's any coolant that has pooled in there