Overheating: Steam coming from top of water pump? What does that point too?

[5spd GT]

I'm going to pull the engine to change out the water pump

So I would assume the reason why the car is running hot is because I lose coolant thru the water pump and when I have a bunch of it it runs cooler (obviously).

 

[HISSIN50]

I would not expect the leaking pump to really contribute to the running hot issue unless:

You are losing so much that the system ends up being low on coolant.

Or it was leaking so bad as to allow a decent loss of pressure.

Otherwise, a weeping pump just gets replaced so it does not have a chance to get worse and dump a lot of coolant (let alone bearing issues, etc).

Good luck David.

 

[Michael Yount]

Yup - seal's shot; and if you were losing a lot -- that would account for the symptoms. But you were checking the level regularly, right?

 

[5spd GT]

Yeah a water pump is definetly going to be replaced. It is leaking quite badly. I have to top off the radiator before I make a 25 minute trip and it will want to start overheating the last few minutes of the trip...yikes.

Anyways, the car runs cool if the radiator is topped "all the way"...so plenty of coolant has to be present (more so than "normal"). Now, the reason why I didn't suspect it was due to low coolant level was because even with the t-stat before I had lower coolant and it ran fine and never had that problem. Then all of a sudden the overheating occured which didn't make sense. Literally one drive and it was doing it...so I never suspected low coolant alone...

Thanks for all the help guys

jricker - Nice write-up...