Posted by Keith in Washington on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 at 1:03PM :
In Reply to: $700.00 to install a water pump, Ouch! posted by Willy-N on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 at 11:39AM :
Willy:
Smile!!!! It is fun to get worked ("S" word is better)over. My son's Nissan Pathfinder had a very noisy water pump. In fact you could feel squeek when turning the pump by hand. We bought a pump and started in the books showed it to be a simple unbolt the pump after removing the fan. Well the book was wrong. They changed the design. It requires you to take off a bunch of front covers on the engine remove the timing belt to get to it. That could be a simple task. But to put it back together you obviously needed to replace the timing belt and and time it. Well to time it requires you to take off the valve covers. The passenger side is simple. To get to the drivers side, off comes the whole intake system (intake manifold, fuel injection and up). At that point my son and I looked at each other and said "to the shop" which I never do. 5 hours of labor and $800+ later we had a new water pump and timing belt.
The whole problem was due to a very poor design. The only part of the water pump that was behind the timing belt was two extended arms that were drilled so that the timing belt cover could be attached. It would have taken a little over an hour for me to do without that and only $80 in parts. It was 10 times that due to some engineers design who never had to service one.
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