1/16/2005: Water Pump Finished
As I mentioned a while back, I am replacing the water pump on my car with a NOS one I purchased on ebay. The pump came “bare” and needed to have the pulley from one of my other pumps pressed onto it.
Here’s the result:
I’m pretty happy with how it came out. It took me a few tries to get the fan to look good. I ended up sanding it with 320, 400, 600, 1000, and 2000 grit sandpaper to take out the scratches. At each level, I would sand (wet) in straight lines, in both directions.
Then I buffed it very lightly with a string wheel and plastic polish on my bench grinder. Pushing too hard on this soft plastic can very easily melt it, and I did have to redo a few spots until I got the right feel for it.
My overall goal wasn’t to make this fan translucent or extremely shiny, just to remove the deep scratches and make it look clean. I think it came out well.
The metal parts were re-plated, and came out pretty looking decent. The plater left a protective coating on the parts that gave them a slightly powdery appearance. On large parts like these rings, I found that a very light application of metal polish takes that off and shines them up. (Hopefully without taking any of the cadmium off)
You can see some pitting on the outer ring.. I probably could have prepared that part better before plating, but it’s fine.
When I originally disassembled these water pumps I used an air chisel with a blunt tip to losen the large nut on the end of the pulley. While this works fine, it does damage the nut slightly. For reassembling it, I decided to try to make a wrench to fit it.
I got this idea from Kerry Chesbro’s site. It appears that ferrari used an identical nut to hold on the steering wheel hub. Kerry ground down a regular socket to make something that would fit:
I liked the idea, so I made my own. I used a cut-off wheel on my grinder and my dremel. It took a bit of trial and error, but what I found worked best was to use the original points on the 6-point socket as centering marks for the 6 tabs that needed to be left. So here’s my final socket.. it worked great.
If anyone would like to borrow it, just drop me an email and i’ll send it to you.
The next projects on my agenda are to finish up cleaning the wiring harness and reassembling the new front suspension.