Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:We're a Honda family. Many cars over many years. We've had good experiences using indy shops for timing belts. We've also had two times where an indy shop didnt go the best work. Those cars never ran the same. Timing belt isnt that unique of a repair. Find a good shop and use Honda parts and you should be ok. Yes, get the water pump swapped too.
Going the dealer route isnt a bad idea either. Sometimes the prices are close. Sometimes dealers have timing belt coupons. Chantilly Honda has coupon for Timing Belt for $799. Water pump not included.
I STRONGLY recommend doing the water pump while the timing cover is off the engine, especially if you haven’t changed the coolant and done a cooling system flush in the life of the vehicle.
Honda claims their OEM coolant is good for 60 months/100k miles, but I see obvious galvanic corrosion in every single Honda I work on still running the factory fill coolant at 5 years. So if you haven’t had a coolant flush service and change, your water pump almost certainly has some corrosion and material erosion on the pump vanes. How much? Don’t know. But it’s there, you can count on that. If one of those vanes breaks off, it might block the outflow, or it might cause the pump to seize. If either of those things happens, you’ll overheat the engine and possibly warp the cylinder heads.
When you’re changing the timing belt and tensioners, the water pump is readily accessible right there in front of you. It makes sense to do it then since you already have everything dissembled. Otherwise you’ll be paying the labor again to replace it when it fails, which it likely will before the next timing belt is due at 200k miles. The only Honda I ever saw with the original water pump at 240k miles was a freakshow all-highway miles car from New Mexico that got driven like 250 miles a day and was only 4 years old.
Look I realize everyone here is a lot smarter than me because they all went to Ivys and now they work in private equity or big law, and I’m just a dumb guy with a small business turning wrenches. But you should take my advice on this one. Do the water pump.
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}