I am in the process of replacing my water pump. After I removed the pump, I found quite a bit of metal-on-metal wear between the impeller and the water pump housing. Yikes!

Is this common?

I've been running a coolant filter on my system for years now, so hopefully its been effective at collecting some of the metal that has clearly been worn away. Either that, or this is a sign that the filter isn't working at all!

I'm a little worried that the new pump will scrape the scars left from the old pump. Any suggestions?

 

Interesting that you posted this. I just had a truck that had 458,000 mi and was checking the engine out. The timing cover had the same issue, but the impeller had no wear marks so it had been changed at some point. Given that this truck was not really worth much anymore, the pump was changed but nothing done with the gouged timing cover. It seems like the impellers come loose, gouge the cover and let you know with the truck then overheating.

Depending on how much work you want to do, you could change the cover but that requires pulling the engine. Given that there is no pitting of the cover, if the new impeller does not drag on the cover, I would run it personally. If you are super paranoid a timing cover change could be done, but on mine since it is an around town pickup instead of a long hauler I left it alone.

 

Oh, I would also flush according to Gooch's procedure since your filtration was bypass. Don't want any metal shavings to end up ruining the new water pump seal!

Additionally, no. I have only heard of this on two trucks and have changed many 7.3 water pumps. The impeller on the new pump should not rub the timing cover, and when the water pump bolts are torqued correctly, the oring will crush fully and the mating surfaces on the pump will touch the timing cover. In other words, there is no way to control the depth of the impeller other than how far it is pressed onto the shaft and bearing play/clearance.

 

Wow. You really dodged a bullet there. A little longer and it would have eaten through the timing cover and you would have had a real disaster on your hands. That is the first one I have seen like that, but I am sure Dirtscooter is correct in saying this is uncommon.

 

This the OEM pump, if so, how many miles on it? If its been replaced before, what pump is this and how many miles on it

 

Thanks for the feedback.

The truck didn't present extreme symptoms before I decided to change out the pump. There was a squeaky belt sound and some a very slow coolant leak from what looked like the weep hole. The truck never overheated and I didn't ever hear any grinding or other nastiness.

I believe that the pump is the original.

The truck has 199.5k miles on it. I've had it for the past 120k or so of those. This is the first time that I've changed the pump. I've had the filter in the mix for about 80k of those miles.

I'm replacing with an OEM Navistar pump from Clay at Riffraff.

 

Good choice with replacement. I was fishing in case its something that needed to be addressed over a certain period of use(miles). I've got the Airtek which has about 120k on it, but also have a new airtek on the shelf...

 

That was a good call on the flush -- Thank you. I got a lot of junk out of there. Each successive bucket-full had less and less sediment in the bottom. The final couple of buckets looked really clean; I am pretty confident that it is about as good as I could make it.

I put in a fresh batch of CAT EC-1, distilled water, and a new coolant filter so hopefully it'll be good again for a while.

 

Just a question. Were you doing the flushing with distilled water? Or at least a final flush? Should be done when changing to the EC-1 rated coolant for desired results. There won't be any "sand" with the EC-1 rated coolant as long as you got a complete flush with distilled done.

 

Yes, I flushed a couple of times with tap water and then pushed through about 18 gallons of distilled.