OK, yesterday afternoon walked out into the driveway and noticed a coolant puddle under my F250 PSD. I'm 99% sure the water pump is bad. I change the coolant out every year but the truck just rolled 100,000 miles this week so I can't complain. Anyhow, I usually check FTE anytime I have a problem and usually find great info. This time I did the search and didn't find anything significant.

I'm going to change it out this weekend and I'll post my results when I finish. I just wanted to open the discussion to help someone else down the road like I've been helped so many times from this site. Please post your experiences.

 

I am suprised you did not find info on waterpump swap - I got al mine here.

First thing I found was the test to be sure it was the pump - If you can wiggle the fan side to side at the shaft then it is bad.

I had to cheap out and buy my pump online. It was a rebuilt pump at <$125, been in for 6 months now and not a problem yet. Not a big fan of cheap parts, but I had to do what I had to do at the time.

I did have to buy a gasket at the dealer, $6 for the one that connects the metal outlet elbow to the pump. It did not come with my cheapo pump, but it did come with the $250 pump that NAPA had to sell.

Took the radiator out, made it a lot easier to work. I would have changed my CPS at the time cuz it was so easy to get to, but I had recently changed it.

You need a big wrench to get the fan off. 1 3/4" I think. I have seen some great posts about getting that fan off, that came out AFTER I did mine. I ended up getting the pump off with the fan attached and then used the blades of the pump to get the leverage to get the fan off. Not pretty but it worked.

I read posts about whether to use gasket sealer on the main O-ring or not. Based on what I read, I did not. (due to polymers of gasket, etc.)

I had misplaced my copy of the Chilton's Manual at the time. So I did the whole job without the book, only using info I got here.

No leaks.

So after you get your pump in and you have saved a ton of money I invite you to click on the "supporter" logo, pay the $16 & Join FTE! Keep a site like this going!

 

This might help. Good luck.
http://www.diesel-central.com/News/waterpump.htm

 

BEWARE! In the instructions cited, which are otherwise very comprehensive, it says to torque the water pump bolts to 35 to 46 ft/lbs.

This is WRONG! Much too high! 18 ft/lbs is considered the correct number. Ford has now modified their official publications to reflect this change.

Otherwise, you're going to be breaking bolts. For sure!

Pop

 

Listen to Springer on that torque. I found out the hard way and snapped a couple bolts. For the most part it is and easy job, except for the fan clutch nut. It can be a real pain. The fan nut should be a 1 7/8 nut. What I did is removed a couple bolts holding the pully on. I took a piece a steel bar stock, about a 1/4 in thick, 1" wide and about 30 " long and drilled a hole in it about 3" from the end. I then used the bolt from the waterpump pulley and screwed the bar stock on the pulley. It ends up working like a spanner wrench,as you rotate the fan nut the bar stock will jam up and hold the pulley and allow the nut to break free. I did not marr anything up doing it this way. I also had to use a dead blow hammer striking the wrench to get it to break free.

 

Thanks Pop. I haven't had to use these instructions yet, just holding on to them for when the time comes. I'd felt bad if somebody had broke bolts because of some instructions I passed along.

 

That's what my Helm manual shows 18ft/lbs.
Nut

 

Look at the original Ford manual, though. Somebody didn't do their homework on that one.

I wonder how many times the dealer techs had to input to Ford's tech pubs department that it was wrong before they decided to make the correction.

We'll never know.

Pop

 

Just did my pump today. That fan was a real pain in the @$$. I too pulled the whole assembly out and got it apart on the bench. I tried to use the pump blades for leverage, but they just kept bending. So I welded a 32mm nut I had layin around onto the impeller. I clamped the nut in a vise, used a bar in the vise to keep it from swiveling. Then I heated the fan nut up to finally break it loose. Only took half a day to get the stupid thing apart. Easy to get back together. I wish I had thought of the idea Noda came up with. Even then, don't know if I could have gotten it done in the vehicle.

 

I did get mine done in the truck. It took me a better part of the day to come with the idea for the tool. Mine was on there so tight, I think it was the original, I had a 1 7/8 wrench and a 4 lbs. dead blow to smack the wrench. Glad to see you got it done sc93f.

 

You definately need the right tools to get that fan off, I made a 1 7/8 wrench out of bar stock that bent on me right away and my strap wrnch was a little too wide but thankfully I read nadakford's post when I did mine and had a piece of stock steel with a hole drilled in it at the bottom and used it as he suggested ....that saved my day as I was running out of options on getting the fan off. Thanks and great idea Nodak !!

Also as SpringerPop suggested I bought a billet thermostat housing and a 203 degree thermostat , Seems that the old housing is made of stamped steel and many people have problems with getting a good seal when re-using the old one. I had no problems with the billet housing, glad I got it ! Got mine from Dieselsite, not cheap but at least I had no problems with leaks.

 

I went cheap and re-used my steel one. When I did a flush last fall, I put in a 203 t-stat with just the o-ring, and that became one of my leaks. This time with the new pump, I put hylomar around the mating surface, so far so good. That hylomar is great, used it to seal my dipstick tube also as my o-ring there came apart.

 

You can rent the correct tools for the fan at most any parts store. It uses a flat stock spanner rench that locks over the fan hub bolts and hold it in place with a 1/2" sruare drive for a breaker bar. And it has the correctly sized spanner for the fan nut, also with a 1/2" square drive hole. Turn what could be a half day job quite literally into a five minute deal. If it's really really tight, which it often is, a second pair of hands to hold one of the breaker bars will seal the deal.

 

I finished it up today. Definitely difficult to get the fan clutch unscrewed; I wound up taking the shroud, fan & water pump off at one time and clamping the pump in my vise by the impeller (if you do this, the upper idler pulley has to come off first). It was easy to break loose then. The bolts that hold my pulley onto the water pump have a wide base that wouldn't allow them to come off until the fan was unscrewed so Nodak's tool wouldn't work for me. The wrench cookie's talking about would have made this a lot easier!

As for the pump, I did some comparison shopping -- Advance Auto - $208, Napa - $185, Autozone - $150. The Autozone pump was a new assembly with a lifetime warranty so that's the way I went. The only real issue was with the provided o ring for the thermostat housing, I put it in but when I was buttoning everything up and test filling with water it leaked. After taking it apart and rechecking my work two times, I compared the new o ring to the old o ring, the new one was basically a round o ring and the old one was a thicker flat square rubber ring. A quick trip to NAPA for the correct seal and we were in business.

 

I used an 8" C clamp to hold the pump pulley and then a pipe wrench to pull off
that big nut. A little Liquid Wrench beforehand might have helped too.
Nut