Been through gambit with my 2001 need help

Yes, that's it. A convenient place to put a wrench just to see if you can easily turn the crankshaft.

Clockwise is the normal direction (top toward the front of the car).

 

Doesn't matter. Park is fine. Park position locks MG2 and the differential from turning, but not MG1 or the engine. (At least, when nothing's broken, which is the thing to find out.)

 

Hmm.

Hmmm.

HMMMM.

So turning the crankshaft was difficult at first, but then it got easy, and now the engine will crank over and start, and the drive belt is busted. Oh, and the pressure plate for the A/C compressor turns easily.

Right now, while your drive belt isn't there, is the perfect time for you to go out there and try to turn by hand:

• The A/C pulley
• The water pump pulley
• The idler pulley

Every one of those should turn easily and smoothly and quietly.

My money is on you finding one that doesn't. And then you'll know why the engine couldn't crank while the belt was there.

 

Please before you burn up another belt, also see if you can rotate by hand the one thing you haven't reported on yet.

It's the part 88301 here, the part the belt was on.

 

No, just the compressor clutch (the parts grouped there as 88410). Buy that.


2002 Toyota Prius Clutch assembly, magnet. Compressor, conditioning, air - 8841047030 - Genuine Toyota Part


When you turned the pressure plate easily, you proved the compressor is ok.

This is good. You would rather change the clutch than change the whole compressor. Changing the whole compressor would mean refrigerant recovery and recharging and the whole nine yards. Changing the clutch is no big deal.

Follow this thread:

A/C Clutch Diagnosis and Replacement | PriusChat

 

Have you read the trouble codes to go with that triangle? If not, all you know is you have the triangle, not what the triangle is for.

If you have a compressor with a clutch on it, sure, you may be able swap the clutch. Does the pulley on that one turn smoothly, no sign of roughness or looseness?

There is probably nothing at all wrong with your current magnet coil (the third part in there, 88302), hence no reason to fuss with swapping that over.

When you remove and reinstall the snap ring that holds the pulley/rotor in place, pay attention to which side of it is beveled. That gets mentioned later on in that clutch thread I linked to, but it's left unsaid in the first post.

Spend the $1.34 on a new shim kit. (The name in the parts catalog is goofy. They're not gaskets, they're shims, three little washers of slightly different thickness, 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5 mm.)



When you move the clutch parts over to the compressor on your car, you'll put in some shims as a test fit. Maybe the same ones that were in there before. Then assemble it and test how far the magnet moves the pressure plate:



If you haven't got a dial indicator, they're cheap at places like Harbor Freight. You can refer to this post for an easy way of switching the magnet coil on and off using a cheap "remote start button" tool your local auto shoppe probably has.

On a good day, you have the right clearance on the first try (0.5 mm is ideal, 0.35 to 0.65 is ok).

Otherwise, you write down the clearance you got, take the pressure plate back off, take those test shims out, and measure what their total thickness is. Then you figure (edit warning: I fixed a mistake here):

needed thickness = test shim thickness + 0.5 mm - measured clearance

and you pick a combination of the shims you have on hand that will add up as close as you can get to needed thickness, and reassemble using those.

Usually there will be two combinations you can pick that will be in the acceptable range, one on the loose side, one on the tight side. If you can get away with it, use the tighter one; you'll get longer use of the clutch before the next time it needs adjustment.

But also check after you have the belt back on and start the engine: when the A/C is turned off, is the pressure plate being dragged around some by the rotating pulley? It should sit still with the A/C turned off.

If it's getting dragged around, fall back to the looser shim combination.

If you hang on to the shims you don't use this time, you'll be all set for another 200,000 miles down the road when you need to correct the clearance again.

 

You'll be testing that when you check the clearance anyway. I've never heard of a bad one. If it is you'll know.

 

The whole "clutch" is all three parts in the grouping 88410 in the diagram above. But I've never heard of the magnet coil (88302) going bad, so I was suggesting to just leave that part alone and swap the other two.

The diagram indicates three small items grouped as 88330A. Those are the shims. It shows three because that's how many come in the new shim kit. You are not guaranteed to find three in there when you take the pressure plate off. More likely one or two. As I described above, the right combination of shims will be chosen to get the right pressure plate clearance.

When you get a shim kit, remember the three shims in it are three different thicknesses. They are so close, 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5 mm, that if you just look at the old one(s) you took out from the compressor, you probably can't tell which you've got without a micrometer. But if you start with the three out of a new kit, which you know are three different sizes, you'll be able to put them in order by feel and know which one is which. Then you can compare the ones out of the compressor to the ones you know.

I've seen people actually miss that the three in the kit were different thicknesses at all. You have to know that they are, and then if you're paying attention you can tell the differences.

Sometimes people taking a clutch apart will find one odd washer in there, noticeably thicker than any of the official shims. No big deal; you still calculate what to use for reassembly the same way.

It's ok to scroll up in the thread and review older posts; I think a lot of them answer questions you're asking, have links that will help you, etc.

 

Experimental suggestion: remove the drive belt, then try to start the engine. If either the water pump or AC compressor is seized, it would behave as Chap describes. So remove the belt; those two items are removed as possible problems. If the engine starts and runs, then you have narrowed the suspect list to something on the belt. If it does not run, then you are left with engine internals as the difficulty.

<edit> I see that Chap has already made a similar suggestion... to test both water pump and AC compressor with the belt slack. Then proceed based on that data.

Good luck with the fault diagnosis!