This morning, the mechanic at Pep Boys called with offsetting bad and good news. Below the cut are pictures of the good and bad news taken from much later in the day after I walked up to collect the van. Here is the old alternator. Do you see the problem yet? Look at that huge broken piece! It's astonishing that the alternator was able to stay in place at all with a break like that! When it actually broke is hard to say, but I'm really glad this didn't fall apart while we were traveling to/from Tonopah! Fortunately, alternators are not a difficult part to replace. Heck, the one they replaced is the one I put in myself after the unfortunate incident of the burning alternator in 2015 . So here is the power steering pump pulley, with the crack much easier to see. I mistakenly said yesterday that the crack was in the body of the P/S pump itself. This crack is not good, and it had been slowly chipping away at the integrity of the serpentine belt, but we don't think it was the cause of the belt falling off — it almost certainly was the multiple problem with the mounting of the alternator. The good news was that they were able to replace just the pulley (lower right in this view) rather than having to replace the entire power steering pump assembly. The P/S pump is in a really awkward location. I reckoned that getting at it might have required removing the front grille and the radiator. Just doing the pulley saved a lot of labor, not to mention the cost of a new P/S pump. In the end, the costs for the additional parts that needed replacing offset the savings of the parts that did not need replacing, so the final cost was about the same as the original estimate. Also visible here it the new serpentine belt, which loops over the alternator (upper right) and the tensioning pulley (upper left). I kept the old serpentine belt. It was not broken, although there are signs of wear from the way the cracked P/S pulley was chipping at it. I'll save this in case we have that belt break while we're on the road. Having had a belt break like that before, this is not an academic thought. We just need to have a way to pull on the tensioning pulley. Now two people can manage this. I was able to pull with all my weight and both hands with just an ordinary socket wrench when I was dealing with restringing a belt after the September 2015 alternator fire; however, there was no way I could get the belt in place while pulling the tensioner. With the right tool, it's easy, and this has now happened often enough that we're going to need to have to get the right tool or at the very least a length of pipe to fit over the socket wrench in order to provide sufficient leverage. So this afternoon, I got the call to collect the minivan. I made my fourth 3.6 km trip between the Holiday Inn Express and the Pep Boys, paid for the repairs, talked to the mechanic, who showed me everything that he had done, and drove back to the hotel. I was able to use the reserved parking for top-end elite members of the IHG hotel program, which was called spire and is now diamond (the signs haven't been changed). While I'm grandfathered into the new top level, I'm unlikely to stay there after this year due to the changes in the program. I'll drop down a couple of levels, but it was really nice to get the diamond upgrade for what turned into a five-night stay here in Fremont. So that's another $1,100 spent on vehicle repairs, on top of the $270 spent on Friday-Saturday on the unrelated rear heater core and plumbing failure. However, the van sounds much better. Squeaks that in retrospect were probably the sounds of the alternator falling apart are gone. We still need to deal with the rear heater core, and it would be nice if we could find a shop that could replace that rear air conditioner as well, but the Astro is running again, and I think it feels much better. Tomorrow morning, I head for home.