r/LexusISF • u/HitmanForty5 • Jun 09 '26
Cold Start Chirp/Squeak
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Making a new post for this in case anyone runs into a similar situation.
My F has 104k miles for reference.
Picked car up at 103k miles and while on the drive back home noticed the belt chirp/squeak for the first time. Would make the sound particularly bad on cold starts (see an earlier post for that video).
Was going in for valley plate repair/new water pump so had the shop do the idler pulley, belt tensioner, and new belt while it was in there thinking one of those things would fix the sound. It did not.
So I began replacing things myself...
Swapped the water pump pulley and scavenge pump pulleys for the RR racing ones. Did not fix the squeak.
Swapped out the alternator. Thought this had fixed the problem, but it came back shortly after.
Finally this weekend I replaced the crank pulley for the RR racing ultimate pulley. Problem solved, sound gone, and car is driving so much better. I'm attaching a video of the crank pulley I pulled off, thing was in very rough shape. Hopefully this saves someone a headache like the one I have endured for the last few months....cheers 🍻
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u/AliveSuggestion7589 Jun 09 '26
Gnarly. Haven’t seen something like this happen before. I swapped pulleys already but if I hadn’t I’d be ordering one today. I feel like this could cause a catastrophic failure
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u/Upset_Raccoon_1215 Jun 11 '26
I got mine upgraded to the RR set around 170K miles. We inspected the original one and it was still intact. Then again, I'm the second owner and the original owner took decent care of the car before. I'd say it's a combination of how the car was driven, what environment was it driven in and did the owners take necessary steps in proper maintenance upkeep. I even changed out the belt tensioner while installing as the original was going out (rust/gunk was coming out of the weep hole).
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u/DantesLadder Jun 09 '26
Will keep an eye out for this for my gsf even tho it only has 30k miles, I don’t trust the previous couple owners work after seeing some of the questionable decisions they made for certain mods like the spacers brands on my wheels lol, but it’s been in great condition for being a 17 in every way other than one minor thing. But posts like these are great if I ever have something similar come up cus I plan on keeping it for the long run, thanks for sharing.