For those of you who don’t know what the symptoms are of a seized water pump, I though I’d let you know what my experience was.
About a week ago I was driving the trep back from Spokane WA, and about halfway back I heard a light whine from the front of the front of the engine. I pulled over and saw that nothing had kicked up into the belts or anything and just crossed my fingers and hoped it would make it back home. Fortunately it did without incident. I of course knew something was wrong, but it was running fine so I decided to drive it to dinner the next day. About 3 blocks from the restaurant the temperature spiked from its normal spot a hair over the ¼ mark to just below the ¾ mark. I of course immediately shut it off and had dinner while it cooled down. On the way home it started spiking again, but I made it home before it reached the ¾ mark again. When I got out there was an odd hot metallic rubbery smell coming from the engine.
Of course I knew it was the water pump, so the next day I pulled the cover and pump, and sure enough the water pump was seized so badly that the impellers would not budge at all either way you tried to turn it. Of course this left me a nice mess of rubber shavings all throughout the timing case from the belt sliding along the immobilized water pump pulley. The thing that really surprised me though was how hosed the tensioner pulley was. Its bearing was chewed up so much that the pulley wheel was just rattling loose on the inner potion with about half an inch of clearance, there were two ball bearings just sitting in the middle of it, and the wheel just fell off when I took the pulley assembly off. This also made it so there was so little tension on the belt that I could easily just slide the belt off the front cam wheel with my hands (Good thing the 3.5 they put in the trep wasn’t an interference engine). It just amazed me that with those two rather major things wrong, it was still purring like a kitten when I pulled it into my parking space.
So I guess the moral to this story is that if you push your trep at all, and like to get the revs up on more then the most rare occasion, it might be a good idea to pull the timing cover occasionally and make sure all the timing pulleys are healthy, since my tensioner, belt, and pump were changed only about 80k ago. So while that’s getting close to the second 100k mile service mark, I really didn’t expect something like this to happen this far before it reached that service interval. Also if you happen to have the same pump as I do, the 6 bolt vs. the 3 bolt pump, you will probably have to have the pump ordered in. I went to 5 different parts stores and 4 of them had the 3 bolt pumps in stock, but none of them had the 6 bolt one in stock, and it took two days to have the part ordered in at all of them.
P.S. For anyone who is wondering, you can change the timing belt on the 1g 3.5 without removing the crank accessory pulley.
About a week ago I was driving the trep back from Spokane WA, and about halfway back I heard a light whine from the front of the front of the engine. I pulled over and saw that nothing had kicked up into the belts or anything and just crossed my fingers and hoped it would make it back home. Fortunately it did without incident. I of course knew something was wrong, but it was running fine so I decided to drive it to dinner the next day. About 3 blocks from the restaurant the temperature spiked from its normal spot a hair over the ¼ mark to just below the ¾ mark. I of course immediately shut it off and had dinner while it cooled down. On the way home it started spiking again, but I made it home before it reached the ¾ mark again. When I got out there was an odd hot metallic rubbery smell coming from the engine.
Of course I knew it was the water pump, so the next day I pulled the cover and pump, and sure enough the water pump was seized so badly that the impellers would not budge at all either way you tried to turn it. Of course this left me a nice mess of rubber shavings all throughout the timing case from the belt sliding along the immobilized water pump pulley. The thing that really surprised me though was how hosed the tensioner pulley was. Its bearing was chewed up so much that the pulley wheel was just rattling loose on the inner potion with about half an inch of clearance, there were two ball bearings just sitting in the middle of it, and the wheel just fell off when I took the pulley assembly off. This also made it so there was so little tension on the belt that I could easily just slide the belt off the front cam wheel with my hands (Good thing the 3.5 they put in the trep wasn’t an interference engine). It just amazed me that with those two rather major things wrong, it was still purring like a kitten when I pulled it into my parking space.
So I guess the moral to this story is that if you push your trep at all, and like to get the revs up on more then the most rare occasion, it might be a good idea to pull the timing cover occasionally and make sure all the timing pulleys are healthy, since my tensioner, belt, and pump were changed only about 80k ago. So while that’s getting close to the second 100k mile service mark, I really didn’t expect something like this to happen this far before it reached that service interval. Also if you happen to have the same pump as I do, the 6 bolt vs. the 3 bolt pump, you will probably have to have the pump ordered in. I went to 5 different parts stores and 4 of them had the 3 bolt pumps in stock, but none of them had the 6 bolt one in stock, and it took two days to have the part ordered in at all of them.
P.S. For anyone who is wondering, you can change the timing belt on the 1g 3.5 without removing the crank accessory pulley.