My sepentine belt idler pulley has had an intermittent squeak for some time especially more so in colder weather but it has now got to the point where the noise is there more than not so action needs to be taken,people are turning round and looking at the car for the wrong reasons!
The complete pulley assembly is available from Lexus of course for around £80.00 but the bearing is actually removeable so I have gone down this route.
After a bit of research I found the correct replacement bearing from a UK supplier based in Birmingham.
The cost was a meagre £1.35 with 60p P+P, incase of any problems I ordered 2 ( if not I have a spare ready in another 19 years!)
I will get my local garage to replace the bearing for a couple of beer tokens.
So if everything goes to plan the job should be done for under a tenner.
I will post up some pictures/tutorial when the job is complete.
Another gadget I bought recently was an engineering stethoscope for £4.00 to diagnose the noisy bearing when it wasn't sqeaking, it worked brilliantly you could actually hear the roughness of the bearing when you stuck it on the casting behind it.