My Freestyle needs a water Pump. I expected this to be a "mystery leak" and expected to be driving about with a store of water in the trunk and ready apologies as I left a trail of drainage wherever I parked.  The leak was obviously coming from the water pump, which was easily reachable and I could replace quickly once I purchased the part.

How much could a water pump cost?

Turns out, it depends on how quickly I needed the parts.  From my local parts store, we're looking at $250 (half the car's purchase price!), it's not in stock at my local store, but it's in the greater Pittsburgh area, so close enough for "same day" availability; however, at Amazon, I can get roughly the same part for $120, delivered in a week.  The monetary differential is nearly 100% ($130, or about one quarter the car's purchase price), but goes to show one of the problems of this exercise: it’s easy to be economical when you already have money and resources:

• I have another car to drive
• I can have a car disassembled in my garage for an indefinite time period
• I have a garage where I can work in comfort

Let’s say I stick with this “live with a $500 car” and not use anything else, due to my employment, I could easily work from home and nobody at the office would bat an eye if I ran late or was absent due to car, or any other for that matter, problems.  Few people have this option who find themselves in the $500 car market -- they're in jobs where the boss is much less flexible and/or compassionate.  Missing work can mean being out of work, so saving money on a car is a luxury and others find themselves trapped, not being able to save money because they don't have enough to be thrifty in the first place.  Being poor is very expensive in the US.

Poverty Trap

The poverty-trap was chronicled with the (now classic) book Nickled and Dimed... by Barbara Ehrenreich, who with modest start-up funds, attempted to get by on a series of low-wage jobs in various cities.  Obvious differences exist
between what the author experienced and “real life”, the key one being that the current situation of the author was entirely voluntary and, most importantly, escapable.  It’s vastly easier to live a life the economic margins when you know you can walk away versus knowing, short of a winning lottery ticket, your circumstances won’t change.


When this book was written around 2000, the author was working at minimum wage jobs paying (then) about $5 per hour.  Today, 16 years later, the legal starting wage “low skilled” jobs is about $7/hour, despite what nobody could deny as generally increasing prices. 

Fed Min wage versus CPI

Or not? I moseyed over to the BLS site and got the CPI one year after we partied like 1999 and compared it's growth in relation to the federal minimum wage over the same period.  CPI was up 37%, and the minimum increased by 40%.  Wait... that means a worker at minimum wage would be slightly better-off now than in Y2K.  What's up with that?  I agree things feel more expensive, more than 37% more expensive... so why doesn't this jive with the data?  I even made a graph showing the percentage change and the cumulative percentage change between 2000 and 2015, the last year data was available. Numbers don't lie, but they also don't necessarily tell the truth.  A question for another day.  (N.B. I'm not at all happy with the hedonistic adjustments in the CPI, but that's an even more tangent discussion...)
 
In this trek with my $500 car, I also have the luxury and peace of mind of knowing that, if the wheels fall off the bus (this might not be figurative), there’s a large safety net to fall back upon.  Some of their safety net comes from hard work, but good fortune as plays a large, if not larger part of my current circumstances.

But am I saving money?   Not sure yet.  Through the character Sam Vimes, prolific author Terry Pratchett said it best:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

I this case, I wonder if my $500 car will be more like Sam's boots, needing constant repairs so that any economy from the low purchase price will be overwhelmed by maintenance costs.  We'll see, time will tell.

Water Pump Replacement

What was this about? A water pump, right? After some searching Amazon and not being that happy with the prices, I settled

New pump

on getting my replacement part from a vendor on Ebay.  They were located in CA, I wasn’t in a rush so I figured I could spare a few days for shipping, which was included in the price of the pump at 89$.  Two business days later, a new water pump was on my front door step.  Amazing!  While the “free two day” shipping included with Amazon Prime sounds good, I’ve found that many other vendors ship just as fast, if not faster, than Amazon’s “two day” promise.

Back to the water pump.  What I ordered is different from pump on the motor in two ways: the impeller is metal and the pump does not attach to the cam with a bolt.  Instead, it has a key matching the notches on the cam.  The new way the pump attaches to the cam is a obvious improvement, as this method eliminates a bolt and possible path for leakage.  The metal impeller’s advantage is less clear, but the “gut” reaction is plastic trumps metal.


The proof, however, is in the pudding, in that the existing water pump failed due to a leaking seal, the impeller remained intact.  The reason behind me choosing the the pump that I did was primarily a price decision.   I think that something else will kill the car before new the water pump stops working.

Prep Work

This pump needed the “top half” from the old pump and included a new gasket.

Mating surface before clean-up

Before putting things back together, I cleaned the mating surface with just a rag and noticed some imperfections.  Not wanting to distort the surface by scraping or using sandpaper, I found the most gentle abrasive in my garage -- cutting compound.  A little water and elbow grease removed just about all of the remaining dirt and a pass with a razor blade removed a few of the larger chunks. 

Cleaner! Ready for seal.  Ribbit!

Surfaces in better shape (but not perfect!), I coated the gasket lightly (very, very lightly) with some sealant and tightened the 8mm bolts in a “star” pattern.  There’s much debate about when to use gasket sealant, for cork gaskets, the rule is “never” and for rubber gaskets the advice is generally “meh”.  I couldn’t find much advice on a metal gasket; however, the sealant material can interfere with the mating surfaces when applied in too great a quantity, but at the same time can help compensate for parts that have some pitting or wear. 

Since the "top" of the water pump looked a little worse for wear, I figured a very thin coating of sealant would be appropriate.  We'll see what happens.  If I get some leakage, I'll know what I did wrong and I'll have practice cleaning the seal mating surfaces.

Fitting the Pump 

Recall the new pump has keys that fit into the notches on the camshaft.  I tried to orient these before putting the pump against the engine, but I needed to reach inside the pump to turn the impeller a little for everything to come into alignment.  When it did, the pump was seated flush and all that was necessary was to tighten the long bolts with 8mm heads so that the part stayed put.

After that, I installed the water manifold (with new thermostat), attached the various hoses and refilled the system with coolant which I'll cover in my next post.