No More Leaks

On Saturday I finished putting the new gasket that was needed onto the waterpump on my Land Rover. I talked about the beginning of the process here.

The problem I had was that I needed some kind of gasket as a spacer to make sure that the impeller doesn't contact the block as the back of the housing. I decided to have a go at making a gasket out of cork from scratch for the spacer.

Armed with a memory of instructions I found on the internet on how to do this I got started. Getting the outside shaped was amazingly easy. With my ball peen hammer I tapped around the edge of the housing which cut the cork on the corner of the housing.

The rest was a bit more difficult. The bigger open spaces allowed me to use the same hammer technique, however when it got in close to the impeller the hammer couldn't reach anymore so I had to resort to using scissors and checking against the housing regularly.

To get the bolt holes we got 2 hammers, set the ball peen of one over the hole and tapped. This cut the cork or at least made a mark, enough so that I could cut the rest of the hole out with scissors.

You can just see the pump in place. I probably should have painted the fan shroud while I had it out, but I didn't really have the abrasives to clean it up enough for good painting.

In the middle you can see a temperature gauge reading about 80 Degrees Celsius. This was after driving around a bit and seeing how the brakes go and so on. Because the fan is always going it probably takes a little longer to warm up than I am used to with a more modern car, but it still gets there no worries so no concerns there.

Now sitting in the back of the yard so I could get the fireball dinghy out. It will move under it's own power, but only in low range. in high range there seems to be something holding it back. I know the brakes need some work so that is my current theory, one of the wheels might not be letting go properly. After that issue is fixed it should be driving well, just needs a full fluid change then I can get on to making sure it will pass rego.

Cheers,

Rex

Fixing the Land Rover

I've made a start on what needs to be done on my new Land Rover. The biggest thing that had to be done first was replace the water pump. The one that was on it had failed so badly that the weep hole in the housing has a stream coming out of it, even when the engine isn't running. I want to get this fixed so I can keep the engine full of coolant and be able to just start it when I need to move it, rather than having to top it off and then try and do everything as quickly as possible.

This is the new pump. I ordered it from E-Bay. It is still raw metal though so I grabbed a can of Kill-Rust paint that I had sitting around and made it not raw metal.

Looks pretty good. I think I will start doing this to all of the parts I take off, to help protect them and also to make the engine bay look a bit cleaner.

We thought it would be easiest to remove the radiator entirely. I forgot to take a picture, but here it is without a rad. There was about 12 bolts with nuts holding it on so we had to take off the grill and then with 2 of us remove all of them, making sure that it didn't fall down as we undid the last few bolts.

Here is the fan and pulley removed. There is a light coat of rust on the inside of the pulley caused by the leak from the pump. Interesting to note the blade and hole spacing is not even. 2 sides are longer and 2 are shorter. Weird.

Really good access now the radiator is out of the way. The water pump is front and center, ready to be removed.

And now it's gone. It is a little crusty inside the housing, however noting is loose so I'm not going to worry about cleaning it other than the gasket surfaces.

The new pump didn't come with a gasket so I was going to have to work something else out. To get this finished that night we were going to try this to seal it up, which should have worked. However the impeller is so deep that without the thickness of the gasket then it collides with the block and can't spin. So I am going to have a crack at making a gasket for this as a spacer as much as anything and then I should be able to start driving this around the yard.

Cheers,
Rex