My daily driver is a ten year old Pontiac Aztek. Don't laugh, it's comfortable and reliable and I got a very good deal on it. Anyway, since I change the coolant on a five year schedule I decided I needed to flush it out before the summer driving season. Since it's ten years old and I have no idea what the life expectancy of coolant hoses is nowdays I thought it would be a good idea to replace all the hoses, belt, water pump, thermostat, plugs, and plug wires while I had it out of service. The garage quoted me $1800 (!) for the job so I understood it wasn't an easy repair, I knew that I would need to unfasten the top mounts and rotate the engine forward to get to the heater hoses and the rear spark plugs but I really wasn't prepared for the number of things that had to be removed for access.
To change the heater hoses I had to remove the cruise control module, the entire windshield wiper assembly with motor and linkage, and the transmission dipstick tube. Of course, to remove the wiper motor and linkage I had to remove the electrical distribution box from the passenger side of the engine compartment. To access the thermostat housing I had to remove the thermostat bypass pipe and the exhaust crossover between the front and rear banks of the engine. To properly access the #1 plug on the back side of the engine I had to remove the alternator.
I got it (basically) finished last night. It's all buttoned up, refilled with coolant and bled to burp the air out of it, and I verified that the heater is blowing warm so most or all the air is out of the cooling system. I just need to go back this evening and check for leaks since I couldn't really do that last night, there are coolant bleeder valves at both ends of the engine so it was peeing coolant and steam all over the place and it was impossible to identify any unwanted leaks with all that intentional leakage.
All in all, the car has been out of service for about three weeks. I didn't work on it every day and most weeknights I would only work on it for an hour and a half or so, that was my frustration point most of the time. I'm glad I still have all my tools from when I used to build race cars, and I'm really glad I have the GTO that I can drive while the daily driver is out of service. As frustrating as it was, I'm only out about $300 in parts plus my time so it's well worth it. I can remember when belts, hoses, thermostat, and spark plugs were a Saturday afternoon job... |
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