Went out to the farm for the weekend. Enjoyed myself tremendously.
Then comes Monday and time to go home and paint and the problems start.
Truck will not start. The batteries are dead. Camper battery hasn't enough power to help. Call the wife to come out and charge/boost the truck batteries. Hook up booster cables and leave car idling to charge up truck battery. Come back 20 minutes later to find steam and a big puddle of coolant under the car. Water pump is shot. But the truck starts.
Go to town and replace truck batteries as they were getting old. Think about dead car 50 kilometers out in the woods and decide to change water pump myself. Shouldn't be a hard job!! I've done it on other vehicles. So I pick up water pump and tools and away I go.
It's a 92 Pontiac Grand Am with a 3.3 liter V6.
Now the fun begans. Turns out that a motor mount has to be removed just to change the belt. Then about half the stuff on top of the engine has to come off. Then they keep on mixing metric and english nuts and bolts. Have to jack up the engine to be able to access some bolts/nuts. Takes me a day to just get it apart.
Takes another half day to put it all back together. All thats left is to put the belt on. Surprize-surprize the bolt on the tensioner is not a standard size. Neither metric nor english will fit. Needless to say more ENGLISH was used. Finally put a 6 in. pipe wrench on the bolt and then used a 20 inch Crescent on it for leverage. This combination slipped several times whacking the fingers. After three - four tries finally got the belt on without catching my fingers. Pour water in and start up and all works. Spend the next few hours trying to bleed the air out of the system. More fun as the rad is filled from the overflow container and there is no petcock on the rad. Finally get it all done about 06:00 PM.
The book time allotment for doing this job is 2.5 hours. Obviously I'm mechanically challenged.
The only thing that kept me going was poverty and the thought that I was saving about a hundred bucks a day.
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