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Shoutout to the old guy at the tractor show in Gilroy who saved me $340 on a water pump
Last month I drove my 1972 Ford 3000 to a small tractor show in Gilroy and it started puking coolant right in the parking field. This older fella named Walt walked over, looked at the drip for maybe 10 seconds, and asked if I had been topping off with hose water instead of distilled. I told him yeah, I had for about two seasons. He said the minerals were eating my seal, not a bad pump, and told me to pull the radiator cap while it cooled and check for white crust around the weep hole. Sure enough there was crust, and a $4 seal kit plus a flush with distilled water fixed it instead of the $340 pump and labor quote I almost agreed to. Sometimes the cheapest fix comes from someone who has owned 20 of these things. Anyone else had a show or meet teach them something that no manual mentioned?
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the_wyatt5d ago
But how do you know it was the seal and not the pump just getting lucky? That guy Walt looked at a drip for 10 seconds and you're ready to crown him. Plenty of old timers will tell you all kinds of stuff with total confidence and half of it is just how they did it on their farm. A $4 seal kit is great until the pump bearing goes out 200 miles from home because the real problem was never fixed. And the distilled water thing gets tossed around a lot but plenty of guys run hose water for decades with no issue, so the crust you saw could've been from something else entirely. I'm not saying you got ripped off, but one fixed tractor doesn't prove anything. The guy at the shop who quoted you $340 might have seen a hundred of these where the seal was just the first thing to go.
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