How to Remove an Old Water Pump

Series Summary

You consider yourself a car aficionado, but the windtunnel designs these days just plain don’t give you the thrill of a ’57 Thunderbird or a classic Corvette. Even the manufacturer redesigns of old standbys such as the Charger and the Mustang can’t compare to the originals. What you need is your own classic, but unless you’re ready to spend a fortune for one which has already been making the rounds at auto shows and race tracks, you will have to do some work yourself. The first thing to do is find the body of a car you consider worth the extensive work involved to restore it. Then you let Expert Village show you exactly how to bang, grind, sand, and patch it back into showroom shape.

In this series of car restoration videos, our body shop owner and hot rod designer shows you how to restore the exterior of that old classic car back into like-new condition. He demonstrates ways to expose rust, grind it away and then repair the body section which rusted. You may find that you will have to replace a whole piece or panel of the body if the rust has really gotten out of control. Expert Village can help you do that too. Our expert will show you how to use a plasma cutter, welder and metal shrinking tool to design, shape, smooth and weld a new part to cover up the old rusty one. Of course, we want to stay safe on your remodeling adventures, so we include a video clip on keeping your work space safe and clean as well as one that focuses on welding safety.

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Doug. I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods, and we're going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. Alright, let's put all this stuff on. First thing we have to do is take off the existing water pump. We're putting a serpentine belt system on this job. It is more compact, we've just gone to that over the years. Whenever we do an engine install, a crate engine, we always like to go with a serpentine. It's simpler, you can get more parts for them, more accessories, it's pretty simple stuff, it's where everything is going. So the first thing we have to do is take off the original standard drive water pump, and put a reverse drive water pump on there. The serpentine runs the water pump the wrong way. So Mark's using a gasket scraper there to clean the big chunks of gasket away. Being careful not to dig in to the steel or anything, not dumping too much junk in to the water passages there. Keeping it clean is a pretty important part of the job."