The alternator belt on my Citroen Xsara diesel broke at the weekend and I got it replaced at the garage yesterday. However this was not a simple (or cheap!!) replacement. The belt was still basically in one piece but had come off the poly V pulley on the crankshaft and jammed itself between the belt tensioner and the camshaft cover, badly bending the tensioner and breaking the camshaft cover.
However the surpise was that there were no grooves left on the crankshaft pulley. The pulley ressembled a flat belt pulley with only an occasional slight impression of where the bottom of a groove had been. All the other driven pulleys were OK and what remained of the old belt also still looked like a poly V belt. The garage people had never seen anything like it and we are left wondering how the grooves had, effectively, been ground off the pulley.
The car is almost exactly five years old with 120,000 on the clock and the belt was the original as far as we can tell.
Jim.