The water pump on my L98 IROC is starting to leak a bit. I'm planning on replacing it tomorrow afternoon after school. I'm assuming it should be fairly straight forward and not a tough job. Any suggestions on do's and don'ts would be appreciated. Also will there be anything else that I will need to take off the car in order to remove the pump or will it come right off? Like the dual fan set up? Do they need to come out? If not great. Let me know.

Ryan

 

Besides draining the cooling system, all you need to do is remove the aircleaner and take the serpentine belt off and after that its just 4 bolts (14mm socket and an extension will do). The only tricky part i remember was getting the pulley off the old pump. The old bolts were on there tight (i'm sure there's a special or something other trick to do this...i had to take the old waterpump apart and jam a screwdriver in the impeller to hold the shaft while i ratched the old bolts off). This would be a good time to replace your radiator hoses and/or t-stat as necessary.

 

Also, take your time scrapping the old gaskets off the block. If you can get an extra hand, the water pump is kind of heavy, so having someone hold it while you start the bolts helps.

 

The factory bolts have loctite on them, thats why they are kinda tight. Shouldnt be any problem getting them off if the belt is still on though.

 

Exactly.Remember to break the pulley bolts loose before removing the belt.It'll make it much easier.
-Rich-

 

in my case the belt tension wasn't enough to hold the pulley still.....

 

Thanks for the heads up guys on everything. The swap went very smoothly. I would have had a hell of a time getting those pulley bolts off if you guys hadn't mentioned loosening them prior to pulling the belt off. Anyway thanks again.

Ryan

 

Here's a neat little tidbit of info me and my friend stumbled into. It came time to replace the water pump on his 89 iroc so we went to Advanced auto and got the pump swaped it on with no problems. A couple days later he calls me up and tells me it was taken fits and runnin over 230 then droping back down. It only did this every now and then. We got to poken around and found our problem. I took the radiator cap off and had him start it, it proceded to shoot antifreeze bout 4 foot in the air out the radiator cap hole. Ends up they gave us a pump for a standard small block not a reverse rotation pump for the serpentine belt setup. Guess you could call it a home made reverse cooling setup, makes me wounder what you would have to do to make it work. It cooled fine most of the time, just every now and then it took fits. He drove it for 3 weeks like this. Let me know what you think

 

Then in that case - and if you had an extra set of hands. Hold the ratchet on the nut and have someone crank the engine over. And then have your buddies place bets as to whether the pulley bolt will brake loose first or your arm comes out of its socket.