How to Replace Water Pump 2002-10 Dodge RAM

Okay, friends, real quick, before we get started on this job, hands and eyes. We're gonna be dealing with chemicals. With that said, we wanna make sure we drain the coolant, and then we're gonna flush the system to make sure we can start off with brand new coolant by the time we're done. Let's go ahead and remove our radiator cap. Set that aside. Noticing that you have a plastic radiator and a plastic petcock, you might also find that the petcock just doesn't want to come out of there. If that's the case, obviously, you don't wanna continue because you could damage the radiator. So we're gonna move right along over here, which is the lower hose to the thermostat housing. Remove the clamp, just be prepared because coolant will come down. I like to put a nice funnel or a box carved out like this so it'll direct it into a nice bucket. At this point, we're gonna slowly take this off of here and try to direct this into our recycling receptacle.

The next thing we're gonna need is a tool that looks like this. You're gonna put it on an air chisel and it's got a nice 36-millimeter head here. We're gonna put it over the fan clutch area. I like to do this while the belt's still on so it holds the pulley from spinning on me. There it is. If you're trying to remove this and you notice your pulley is spinning, just take a bolt, put it through the hole in the pulley, and put it up against the water pump. At that point, you should be able to spin this to break it free. Okay, it's getting close. Just make sure when it comes off, it doesn't fall down and hit the radiator. Set that aside. Now it's gonna be time to get the belt off of here. Just take a quick peek or even draw a diagram of the routing for the belt before. After you've done that, go ahead and put your serpentine belt tool onto your actual tensioner pulley area. We're gonna turn this clockwise. That's gonna relieve tension. Now we can get the belt right off and out of the way. Now that the belt's out of the way, let's go ahead and remove our idler pulley here.

Put the water pump right up here and that way there, as we remove the bolts, we can put them into the corresponding holes because some are actually gonna be different lengths. There's gonna be eight of them. So if you look down at your engine, you're gonna be able to see the mounting bolts going around this. We're gonna remove all of those and then we'll remove the water pump. Big difference. Almost there. Let's go ahead and get this last bolt out of here and break this free. Let's get this out of here. There it is, friends. Now we're gonna take a nice scraper or even a razor blade like this and carefully clean along the areas where the seal's gonna ride for our new water pump. Now that we have this area cleaned down so that all the rough edges or raised edges are off of the mating surface, let's continue on by looking at the bolts for our water pump.

On all the longer bolts, you're probably gonna see that it has a little bit of adhesive on there. That's actually a thread sealer and you need to make sure you clean it off with a wire wheel or whatever you've got, and then reapply some. It either comes in a gel or, of course, you can just go ahead and get yourself some of this thread tape. All right, so now we have our bolts nice and cleaned and, of course, I have that thread sealer on there, I'm just gonna go ahead and put in the bolts into the old water pump now so I can remember where they go. I'm gonna switch these right over, grab onto our new water pump. Let's get ready for our install. Let's go ahead and put our new gasket onto our new water pump. Just line it up with the way that it needs to go. Now it's gonna be time to get our new water pump back into the vehicle. I'm just gonna turn out like this. See if I can squeeze it down and through here. Just like that. There we are.

Let's line it up in the direction that it needs to go. When you're looking at the water pump, I'm gonna turn it a little bit, you want this little weep hole right behind the pulley there to be facing in the upward position. That should pretty much line it up where you want it. And then, of course, we'll grab our bolts and we'll start putting them in. Start that top bolt in. All right. Now we're gonna start in all the rest of our bolts in corresponding order. And then we'll go ahead and snug them up. Once they're all snugged, let's go ahead and torque them to 43 foot-pounds. Go ahead and get our idler pulley back on here onto its spot. I'm gonna start this in and then we'll snug it up. Snug it up with a ratchet. There we go. It's bottomed out. Tiny bit more, awesome. Time to spray down the area with some parts cleaner.

Now it's gonna be time to install our serpentine belt. Let's go around the crank on the bottom there, put it up and over the top of the idler pulley, down and under the tensioner, up over the AC, just like this. Now at this point, we're gonna take the other end. We're gonna go around that power steering pump pulley, and we're gonna hold this nice and taut. Come up and over the alternator and then bring this down and it should be ready to go over that water pump. Use your serpentine belt tool to relieve tension. Put the belt down and around your water pump pulley. It's a nice smooth pulley, should go over fairly easily. There we are.

Now, just check all your pulleys, make sure it's sitting especially on the ones with the grooves you want it sitting in where it's supposed to. This looks good. Let's get this out of the way. Let's start the fan back onto the water pump here. We're just gonna bottom this out and then we'll just snug it up real quick. Get our tool back on here, and we're just gonna snug this. That's it right there. So now we're gonna the hose onto the thermostat housing here until it's completely bottomed out against the housing. Once we get the clamp on there, we want to make sure it's approximately an eighth of an inch away from the end of the hose. And, of course, we'll snug it up. It's gonna be time to fill the cooling system. You want a nice funnel like this, and you want to make sure you use the proper coolant. You want to use coolant that's either orange or, of course, the universal coolant, but definitely not green. I'll go with universal here and fill it right up.

Now after you've run your vehicle for a while and you burped out all the air in it, you wanna make sure you go ahead and put your radiator cap back on here, push this right down, turn it so it's nice and tight. And now we're gonna fill the overflow. Okay, close the hood. Take it for a road test.