damaged water pump.

[Dano!]

Today i started hearing rattling / scraping / grinding from the waterpump in my kids Navajo, and tomorrow i will use the sticky thread to remove and replace it. My question is, what kind of damage, if any can the broken pieces do in there? Is there anything i should be concerned about or look for?
There is coolant comming out of what looks like a vent hole on the bottom of the water pump as well. Don't know if that means anything other than what i already know.

Any insight would be great thanks.

Dano

 

[Anime]

The rattling noise is usually just from the bearing going bad. It's very rare for parts of the impeller to break off unless the pump has been driven for awhile with the bad bearing, and it has made contact with the pump body because the serpentine belt tension angles it that way.

Replace it ASAP and all should be fine. If you do notice any pieces broken off, you will hopefully either find them inside the lower radiator hose or the heater hose that goes to the pump. If not then it might get stuck prior to entering the heater core, and you will hopefully find it in there, though you might have to remove it (not hard) and/or backflush it to get the chunk/chunks out.

The weep hole at the bottom is doing what it's supposed to. When the pump fails, coolant goes out the weep hole. That's the first clue (other than noise) that the pump is bad and needs to be replaced.

 

[Dano!]

Awesome. And thank you. I went ahead and purchased a new radiator fan + fan clutch to go along with the water pump. And thanks to the awesome write up fellow members typed up thing pretty much went smoothly. There wasnt any broken pieces anywhere or anything broken off the water pump. Luckily i cought it on time. Thank you for your input though.
This was the first time my daughter did any real maintenance on her truck. And even though she still doesn't know the difference between a breaker bar and a torque wrench, i was proud.

An hour later after the silicone dried up we fired it up and it was perfect. The only thing i was concerned about was the quality of the mew fan blade. (Chinese) it came with a spacer that i put to the side. The thickness of the plastic was questionable too.

 

[Anime]

Generally the aftermarket fan clutches and blades are inferior to the stock Motorcraft stuff. If there was nothing wrong with the original fan clutch and fan blade it might be best to put them back in.

The Dorman fan blade (9 blades, gold center) is okay for $10-15, but you can get a new Motorcraft one for ~$50. If nothing else, be sure to keep the receipt, the Dorman blade has a lifetime warranty and it can be replaced over and over when it cracks.