Originally posted by HITMANinMI:
If your car was severly overheating from a water pump not working, there would be paint chips flying off the top of hood, happened to my car, the one before my Contour, it was a 1990 Camry, it took a while to realzie it to, but by then the engine was wrecked, so that car was junk.
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When your water pump goes, either one of two things can happen, it will leak, or it will seize up and blow the bearings, and make metal fly and destroy the radiator and cooling fan, and maybe a few other things.



An interesting story related to overheating contours...

My contour was borrowed by my sister recently, and the WP failed while she was commuting to work. Instead of calling me, she decided to DRIVE IT HOME at the end of the day!! She drove 25 miles on the highway, and when she pulled off, she said it was smoking, and the oil light was on nice and solid. Needless to say, I thought the engine was toast. Surprisingly, After replacing the WP, temp sender and thermostat, everything runs fine! 10k miles later, not a single problem. I don't know if this is typical of these engines, but I must say I'm impressed. Someday I'm going to get around to doing a compression test to see if there's anything wrong that's not obvious, but still. The sucker got hot and still runs!

Originally posted by HITMANinMI:
On this Contour to be safe I will replace the water pump at 60,000 miles when I get the timing belt redone, I have yet to get it done because my Contour just hit 53,500 today.



Replace the waterpump with either the replacement from NAPA (metal impeller), or the newer version of the pump (white plastic instead of black plastic). Don't wait until the mileage gets to 60k... they tend to go at "around" 60k, where that number tends to be +/- 20k. If the waterpump fails, you'll regret it

Michael Rossini '98 Ford Contour SE