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Seized Water Pump

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3K views 4 replies 3 participants last post by  24vsleeper  
#1 ·
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.
 
#3 ·
I would love my timing belt…if it weren’t driving the water pump too. But I’m happy to have an OHC engine, so it’s all good.
Northern Montana, it is a great area. The unfortunate thing is that the fire seasons have been nasty almost every year for the past decade. So as much as I like the area, if it’s smokey like it was this summer again next year I’m going to have to move. Driving to and from Spokane I drove right by that same stretch where I had that high speed run shot, and I could hardly see a truck that was only about 2 blocks ahead of me on the highway, and if I’d driven past that spot you wouldn’t have been able to see any of the mountains.
 
#4 ·
It all sounds too familiar to me.
My wife's Intrepid spit out the bearings on the tensioner and got loose enough that when she accelerated to pass a truck when the lane opened to 2 lanes that the belt jumped time and then it just died on her.
Replaced the belt, tensioner, and water pump.
That was a couple of years ago.
Just this year the water pump seized and broke off the plastic fins.

I guess what these threads should be teaching everyone is to check out the tensioner pulley while you are in there doing a water pump, timing belt, or anything else.

KP
 
#5 · (Edited)
That’s true. It’s easy to forget that with a timing belt vs. a chain you have some parts that wear much faster, since the tension that is kept on the timing belt is considerably higher then the tension on the accessory belt. And then when the water pump is driven by the same belt there’s even more going on with that belt system.
I still am curious why some a few 97 Intrepids have a six bolt water pumps when most have three bolt ones.