I have a 2007 Mini Cooper S turbo of course. The articles at Pelican are fantastic. I tried the serpentine belt replacement which I could not complete. Everything went exactly as in the article until the part about using the 30mm box wrench to move the tensioner and then pushing that pin in to hold the tensioner in the "belt is slack" position. Firstly, part of the turbo hose is in the way of where that wrench needs to go. Secondly I could not budge the tensioner. I has a 12 point or so nut on the end which was bigger than my 19mm socket which was the biggest metric I had. THere is also a corrugated area on the tensioner which might have worked if I could get a vice grip on it. I don't know where that 30 mm wrench idea came from but it won't work on this car. THere is almost no room to move a wrench without getting that turbo hose out of the way. Difficult job for something like this. THe arrows and guidelines in the article are great except for the 30 mm wrench matter. I did the job on a sunday and could not run to the store for more wrenches so I had to put the car back together and concede defeat on this one !

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This post was auto-generated based upon a question asked on our tech article page here: MINI Cooper Serpentine Belt Replacement (R50/R52/R53 2001-2006) | Pelican Parts DIY Maintenance Article

There are two versions of the procedure. I prefer to do it this way:

http://www.pelicanparts.com/techarticles/MINI_R56/03-ENGINE-Drive_Belt_Replacement/03-ENGINE-Drive_Belt_Replacement.htm

- Nick