I have a coolant leak in my '90 Firebird V6. Its coming from below the water pump, it drips down around the crank pulley, its really minor, like 1 drip per 5 seconds, and it kinda stops when the engine is warm.

Its not affecting my temp, which always is below or will level off at 220, and the levels don't seem to drop much, I check it every so often to make sure. I was recently out of town for 3 weeks and my wife said it overheated one day, so she filled the reserve tank with antifreeze and parked it in the garage, when I got home, I check the radiator itself, and it looked like half empty, I'm not sure if my reserve tank is working right, but thats another matter... (clueless)

I don't know a whole lot about water pumps, but I'm assuming my gasket is bad, or maybe its the pump itself, which is stock with like 150,000 miles on it. I'm going to buy a new pump/gasket today and replace it, but I'm buying a cardone rebuilt one since they're cheaper, which I just read in a prior thread will probably fail at around 30k miles, so what I want to know is, how can you tell if your pump fails, like what are the symptoms, someone said something about water coming out of a little hole in the bottom of it, is that what mine is doing now? If someone could explain that to me, that would be cool.

Thanks!

(ps - is it illegal to drain coolant into the sewer? I think it is, but I'm not positive. WA state.)

 

sounds like the little hole in the water pump let go . Their like a drain hole in it and mine just went bad on mine and i just replaced it . A new one is like 30 or less from advance auto . But it should stop leaking if you run the car and then when its off it will leak . Just replace it , if your sure its that and not like a loose hose .

 

Positive its not a loose hose, it only has one hose going into it which is right on top, I bought a new one today, it was only 20 bucks, so no big deal, hopefully I can get it on there without too much hassle. Thanks for the help!

 

It's actually called a weep hole, it's there to give you an early warning that the pump is starting to fail before it does so catastrophically.

 

Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea how it works? Like is it a seal on the rotor that leaks by, or the bearing? Doesn't matter for anything, just like to know more about stuff

 

That's pretty much it, when it starts to wear coolant creeps up the shaft and drips out the weep hole. Let it go for too long and eventually the whole thing self-destructs.