did you do the timing belt ?with the water pump
yep…i haven’t put everything back up yet. My engine mount bracket needs to be re-thread and i need a new bolt for the mount also.
I’ve seen several complaints here about the plastic water pump impellers. I’m guessing this was an experiment the manufacturer’s are doing, to reduce weight. Apparently the downside may be reduced reliability.
I think BMW also used plastic water pump impellers . . . and also suffered the consequences
Plastic water pump impellers have been around for at least 15 years. I’ve seen them on VW, BMW, Ford, Cadillac, and I’m sure others as well.
Steel rusts away, plastic cracks, sometimes things just break.
Plastic impellers = stupid.
Just another example of short-sighted engineering and/or cost cutting moves. Like most examples it did what it was supposed to do; survive the warranty period…
Plastic water pump impellers seem like a bad idea for cars. But I could be wrong. Maybe the reliability tests show plastic impellers to be as reliable as metal ones. Plastic certainly seems like it has the advantage of less corrosion w/water. But all the forces and jostling a water pump impeller experiences, that seems problematic to me, an admitted novice on the science of materials.
I can say the impeller on my 1977 Hoover upright carpet vacuum I purchased for $35 new was made of some kind of heavy duty plastic like material. Bakelite I think. That vacuum served me with no problem at all, worked like new until just last year, when one day the impeller exploded. Pieces went everywhere. That’s how I found out what it was made of. 35 years of trouble free operation, followed by an impeller failure, well, I have no complaints. If they had a junkyard for vacuum cleaners, I’d have gone there and got a replacement impeller off a junker. I took an old clothes dryer apart to see if that impeller would work, but it was too big. But it was made of the same stuff. An impeller is a complicated piece to machine out of metal, they probably make it in a mold when they make it in plastic, that’s another advantage.
Bakelite is actually a very early, and high quality, plastic
35 years is not bad at all
Things are made out of injection molded plastic because it’s cheaper; not necessarily better. Bakelite holds up extremely well and it could be that the vacuum impeller disentegrated because the vacuum inhaled something at one time that caused a tiny fracture.
Eventually the fracture goes wild…