Piet is still overheating. The thermostat replacement and radiator flush didn’t do a thing for him, so it was time to try something different. “Something different,” in this case, was replacing the fan clutch and the water pump.
The Chilton’s manual made it look as though a water pump removal was uncomplicated, so I decided I’d do both instead of just the fan clutch. This was Mistake Number One. Contrary to pictures and descriptions, the water pump won’t come off unless you:
- Remove the fan assembly.
- Remove the radiator, so you have enough elbow room to work.
- Remove the air cleaner assembly and all the hoses that attach to it.
- Remove the serpentine belt, so you can
- Remove the air-conditioner compressor, and
- Remove the power steering pump.
And don’t forget to bring your penetrating oil, breaker bar, tensioner bar, electric impact driver, torx bit set, metric socket set, and flange wrench set, along with all the other ordinary tools you’d normally fetch along for a job.
I started in yesterday between ten and eleven in the morning, jacked and braced Piet, drained the cooling system, and pretty quickly had the fan clutch off. Then I had to run to the parts house after a new serpentine belt, ’cos the old one was cracked and alligatored and obviously wanted replacing. They lent me a specialized tool for releasing the tension on the belt’s tensioner pulley, and it did its job all day despite, as I soon found out, being broken. (The square drive stud which held the socket broke free of the spot-weld that held it, so the stud fell off unless you held it j-u-u-u-u-u-u-s-t so.)
When I started on the water pump, I found that most of the pump was held on by bolts with torx heads, a strange star-shaped bit that I’ve only ever seen used in cars. I didn’t have a full torx set. This meant a trip to the hardware store. After that I discovered that at least some of those bolts had never been removed since the day Piet came off the assembly line in August 1986, and were in there. My across-the-street neighbor, he of the Porsche on blocks, came to my rescue with an electric impact driver . . . that was about an inch too long to fit unless I took out the radiator. The radiator didn’t want to come out. Besides the two usual hoses, there were two copper pipes that ran to the transmission cooler, which is built into one side of the radiator. Those fittings were hard to reach (out came the battery), and glued in with ancient grease and dirt. I think this is when I cut myself a new hangnail on my left ring finger.
Eventually I got the radiator out, got Don’s impact wrench going (which required hunting out even more adapters and bits), and started pulling bolts. The torx mostly came out easily, except for one that just didn’t want to turn loose. When I had them all done, I looked and realized that part of the pump, with its bolts, was under the bracket for the power steering pump, which was under the bracket for the A/C compressor. More impact-wrenching ensued, and finally those bolts broke loose. I pulled them out, draped the pumps over the edge, and pulled those last two torx.
Remarkably, the water pump looked very, very clean inside, with no corrosion at all. I’m not sure I did need to replace it. However, since I had it off anyhow I switched it out, and started trying to match up the right bolts to the right holes. That part was no fun. One bolt looks much like another, and a few times I just prayed I had the right bolt in the right place. I suppose if I didn’t, I’ll find out one day when the engine block splits where the impact wrench drove the bolt into the block.
Once I had all the pumps bolted back on, I started on the fan clutch. And the bolts to fasten the clutch to the fan didn’t fit. And the new clutch didn’t have any bolts with it, ’cos they expected you to re-use the bolts from the old clutch. And when I took the clutch back to the parts shop to complain, they said, “Oh wow, you must have a 1986 clutch, they used the nine millimeter bolts instead of ten-millimeter.” They gave me an ’86-model fan clutch.
The shaft on the ’86 clutch was too big to go through the hole in the fan.
I took clutch and fan back to the parts shop again, so they could see for themselves, and they scratched their heads and said, “Gee, I dunno how that happened, so I guess you will have to use the ’87 clutch after all . . . oh, and we don’t have any bolts the right size so I guess you’ll have to go find some somewhere else.” Thanks a motherfuckin’ bunch, assholes.
A second parts house only had two of the right sized bolts, which did me no good either. In the end, I wound up at Home Depot’s hardware department. They, at least, had 10mm-1.5 x 10mm studs, which was close enough to do. (In case you’re counting, this was sixth trip of the day to buy either parts or tools, wasting a good half hour each time.)
I finished buttoning everything up near eight o’clock, just as the sun was going down. It had been to dark to see what I was doing for half an hour before that. By the time I’d put everything away, I was almost crying from weariness. I’d been standing over and lying under that truck for eight hours straight, my feet and legs were on fire from over-use, all my pulling and pushing muscles in my back and arms ached and promised worse for tomorrow.
L, bless her, got me into the shower and scrubbed me down all over to get off the grease and dirt, and then she and M went out to keep me company while I ate a steak. (Oh, yes—I hadn’t eaten anything at all since a very small and early breakfast that was long since gone.)
This morning I filled up the cooling system again and test-drove Piet a bit. I’m not happy with how he feels. His transmission is slow to pick up and slow to shift, and the fan is roaring intermittently, which means it’s running overspeed and I didn’t get the clutch installed right. I’ve also got to figure out whether the low coolant level in the reservoir means I’m actually losing coolant somewhere inside the engine, or just that I hadn’t got all the air out of it when I started off. Any way I do it, I see a trip to Ron coming. I only hope he doesn’t tell me I have split the block and have to get another engine.
