1996 Dodge Ram 1500 Truck Water Pump Inlet Tube Dorman Help 56399

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, we're going to be working on a 1996 Dodge Ram 1500, and we're going to be replacing the water pump inlet tube. If you need this or any other part, check us out, 1aauto.com. Thanks.

Now that we're underneath the hood, one of the first things we have to do is remove our radiator cap. We do that by pressing down and turning counterclockwise. We're going to lift it up away from us and take a peek. Make sure that it's not cracked or deformed in any way. This one looks perfectly fine and I would say it's reusable. We'll set that aside and we can continue.

Right up here is where the drain is, or the petcock. I'll just show you with this hose. Right up here. It's got a little flat twist where you just grab right onto it and you can turn it counterclockwise and it'll loosen up. I grab myself a short piece of hose. If you can find one that's softer than this one it might work out better for you, but essentially, we're just going to go over the end of that petcock and we're going to make it so this has a nice drain and it's going to go into our catch bucket so we can recycle the coolant properly. We'll get this up on here and then we'll open it up.

There we go. That's fairly secured at this point. Now, I'm going to grab my bucket, a set of pliers, and I'll get up in there. I'm going to carefully take my pliers and I'm just going to give this a little wiggle side to side, and we'll turn to the left once I feel like it starts wanting to break free. I've got my safety glasses on, of course, and my hand protection because I'm dealing with a chemical here. There we are. We've got coolant draining. We're just going to give this a couple of minutes to finish doing its thing and then we can continue.

Okay, so now we're just going to grab onto this clamp right here. We'll squeeze those two ears together, we'll slide the clamp down a little bit and get the hose off of the water pump. I'm going to use my squeeze clamp tool, just grabs onto the ears, give it a nice squeeze. Nice. Wiggle this around. Cool. I'm just going to slide that down. Of course, the serpentine belt is in the way, but I'll just give it a spin. That'll pull it down far enough. Take my tool off of there. Grab this hose, move my flashlight. Just give it a little wiggle. See if I can get it to break free from the water pump. Move on, get it off the radiator side. Okay, well, I wasn't expecting that. There we go. Give it a nice little tug, and here my friends is our lower radiator hose.

We're just going to grab this hose, give it a little twist off the radiator just like that. Take a peek at it. Make sure it doesn't look like it's all dry rotted and cracked. This one looks like it's reusable. I'm going to grab this. Just give it a nice little jerk in the upward direction and it should want to break free, and there it is. What was holding it in, you've got these right here, this right here, and then this little nub. Those just slide into here. That's where the nub goes, and then of course down here. You've got this little area down along the bottom. You want to make sure that you line that up with the area on the bottom of your reservoir. There it is. Set this aside.

Let's get this clamp off of here so we can get our hose off. Just leave that right down there. I'm just going to grab the hose, give it a little wiggle, see if I can get it to break free from the radiator. Awesome. As we take a look down here, you're going to see what I'm seeing. We see we've got our serpentine belt on here, and that goes around our water pump pulley, which is right down there. The water pump pulley has the fan clutch mounted onto it, so we're going to have to remove the fan clutch to be able to get the pulley off. We'll have to take off the serpentine belt, and then we can get to all of the mounting bolts for the water pump.

It might be easier, and we're probably going to do this. We're just going to take the fan shroud right out of the way and that way there when we're doing the water pump, you'll have a clear view of what's going on. It'll be much easier to get in there with the camera. Do you need to take off the fan shroud to do this? No, I wouldn't say that you need to at all. You could try to sneak your hands in there and weasel everything out and I'm sure it'll probably work for you. It's really not that hard to get this fan shroud out of here, so that's the way that we're going to do it.

To get our washer fluid reservoir up, you're going to use something as basic as a flathead screwdriver. You're going to come right along your fan shroud and the washer tank just right approximately about here. Just underneath where it kind of does down at an angle. I'm going to go in with it and then I'm just going to lift up on my washer fluid reservoir. Get my screwdriver out of there and up it comes. The reason for having to do that is because these little nubs right here go into the fan shroud and they kind of lock it in. When I went in with the screwdriver, one right here, give it a little pry. It separated them from the fan shroud and it came right up. We're going to just set this aside so it's out of our way and we can continue.

We're going to take out our mounting bolts that hold the shroud to the radiator. I'm going to use a 10mm. I'm just going to use it on my little air gun here. You can use something as simple as a ratchet. I like the air gun because it provides a little bit of vibration at the same time which will help break free some rust if you have a rusted condition. Of course, it doesn't seem like it's going to want to come off. I'm just going to try it one more time, see if I can get my socket on there a little further.

When you have a rounded out bolt and your 10mm just isn't working or whatever size it is you're using, you can go with a socket that looks something like this. It's called a twisty socket and it's kind of rifled inside. You can see where it kind of looks like it's a Tom Brady twist there. When you hammer it onto your bolt, it's going to twist and it's going to lock right in, and then as you try to loosen, the rifling there is just going to grip in even more and it's going to continue trying to grip as you try to loosen it up. Let's get it on there.

At this point, I'm going to use my ratchet. Make sure I got it in the off position. Oh yeah, gripped right on. That's beautiful. This socket has come in handy more times than not. It's nice to have a full set of them. You never know when you're going to need them. It could be a big bolt, could be a small bolt. There, can get that on there. We just want to make sure all those bolts came out and they did, so this can move around freely. That's always nice. I'm just going to take one and go right in this top hole right here. Why are you doing that, Len? Well, it's a good question, because we need to take off this fan clutch still. See that big old nut down there? That screws right on to the water pump itself, and so obviously we can't have this thing flopping around in our way. We're going to grab our tool and we can continue.

We're going to use our 36mm fan clutch tool. Just goes right on this like this. This part right here goes into your air chisel. Just going to get this right on here. It's ready to go. We're going to put this on so it's going to be trying to loosen this nut, so turning it to the left counterclockwise. There we are. Give this a little spin. I can see the whole nut turning, so that's great. We know that this is ready to come off.

Now, you want to be careful because when it falls down you don't want any of these fan blades to go ahead and bonk into your radiator cooling vents. Just have your hands ready to try to catch it. Odds are that it's not going to fall down in that direction and it's quite a bit of space between the two, but it couldn't hurt to at least try. There it is, cool. It fell straight down. That's awesome. I'm going to get our tool out of the way. We'll just get our bolt back out of here. That right there so we can't lose it. Grab our fan shroud. Give it a little lift, and grab the fan. Get this right out of the way ahead of time. Fan shroud, there it is.

We have a clear view of what's going now. You've got your water pump right here. You got your serpentine belt. You got your tensioner all the way over here. This is what you're going to relieve tension on the belt to be able to take it off, but before we go ahead and remove the belt, we want to make sure that we know which way the belt goes. You can either take a mental note, take a physical picture, draw a picture, or even if your vehicle has one of these, just take a look at the picture for when you're rerouting. This is going to make it pretty easy. Let's continue.

Grab our serpentine belt tool. I'm going to turn this clockwise. As you can tell, that relieves pressure from the belt. Get this right out of here. We can take our belt right out of the way. That way there we don't get coolant all over it. It's always a good idea to double check your belt, though in between the lines right here. You want to make sure that you don't have a whole bunch of cracks. If this is all cracked up, you'd want to replace it. Generally speaking, more than six cracks within one inch, which is about the size between my two thumbs, kind of means your belt needs to be replaced. This one is in really good condition. We'll set it aside and we can continue.

We're going to remove this hose. To do that, we're going to squeeze this clamp, slide it up the hose, and then try to get the hose off of our tube. Just close these a little bit more. Pry that right up and out of the way. Awesome. Just going to grab the hose, see if I can get it to break free. Just give this a little wiggle. We've just got to get it to break free all the way around. It's getting close now. If you wanted to and you had a hose pick, you can go right up in here. Just try to go around this with the pick in between the metal and the rubber. You just want to be careful when you're using the pick or the pliers that you don't damage your hose. If you poke a hole, that's going to cause an issue. At that point, you would just replace this.

I'm just going to do this a little bit. It's going to come up slow, of course. There we are. Check your hose. If you look right along the sides here and you see cracks that are going in this direction towards the center from the outside in, you'd want to replace the hose. We're just going to clean up around here real quick and while we have the opportunity. I'm going to clean it up and then I'm going to put a little bit of penetrant, let it soak while we continue on to getting off the rest of this. Let's get off as much of this crud around here as possible. Awesome. Let that do its job for a minute. We're going to take off this bracket bolt here which holds the tube in. I'm going to use a 14mm. Nice long bolt for you. Holy moly. There's your bolt. Only needs to really be about that long, but whatever. Put that up there.

Now, I'm just going to grab some pliers. I'm going to grab onto this and I'm going to try to wiggle it around. See if I can get it to break free right along here. This is pretty common that these just don't want to come out. It just kind of is what it is. Here we go. It's moving pretty easy now once I got it broken free. Try to grab with the pliers here. Here's our coolant inlet tube.

Here we are, friends. A quick product comparison for you. Right here we have our original coolant inlet tube out of our 1996 Dodge Ram 1500. Right here, we have our brand new quality 1A Auto part. As you can tell, these parts are created equal. This one is kind of bent up at this point, but if it was not bent because I didn't just remove it from the vehicle, it would look exactly the same. We've got a brand new gasket right here. That's super important because when you push this into the water pump, you need to make sure that you have some sort of seal there.

We're obviously going to put a little bit of oil or maybe a little bit of grease along there. That's just going to help it slide in when we go to install, but this part right here will fit in perfectly. Comes with the same mounting area you've got there, and then of course the other end for where your hose connects onto. As you can tell, this is a quality part and it's available at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

We have our coolant inlet tube. I like to use a little bit of grease on there. Just whatever you got that's clean. You could even use a little bit of oil if you have oil or I guess penetrating oil if you needed to use that. I like to use anything that'll work as a lubricant to slide down in that hole so I don't rip my seal. Now, I'm just going to take it and bring it over here. I'm just going to give it like a light twist, slight push as I go. It's going to slide right into its spot where it's happy. I like it right like that. Perfect. I'm going to grab our super long bolt, put it right in here. We'll just snug this right up. Just make sure you have it pushed down all the way. That's nice and snug.

Got our hose. I'm just going to slide it right on there. Perfect. Squeeze this down. I've got my pliers. I'm just going to bring my clamp down the hose here. I'm just going to try to get it lined up with where it originally came from. It was happy there. It was there for a long, long time. I like to put things back where they came from. Perfect. It's time to get our serpentine belt back on. I want to go over the crank, which is the lower pulley, maybe. There we go. Around your water pump, over this way to the power steering, up over the top of the AC, down under your idler, over your alternator, and then around to your tensioner. Just be sure this all ready for us. Cool. I'm going to go like this. I'm going to take it off of the idler, get it ready so it's on those.

Let's get our serpentine belt tool on there. Get our belt ready again. Make sure it's around all the pulleys exactly where you need it to be. That stuff feels great. Grab our tool. Awesome. I like to go like this a couple of times. That's good. Make sure you take your adapter off of there. Sometimes they like to get stuck and you don't realize it. You think you get your tool off and leave this and drive down the road and this thing goes into the fan, makes a whole bunch of noise, think your engine is rattling apart. Just double check. Make sure your belt is in all the grooves going all the way around every single pulley. Obviously, there is no grooves in this pulley. Got our crank pulley. Feels great. Tensioner pulley, great. Alternator, idler, there's no grooves, so that's easy, AC. Perfect. We'll recheck it after we start the vehicle.

Here we go, friends. It's time to get our fan shroud back inside the vehicle. I'm going to bring it right down. Set our fan. Got that water fluid reservoir blocking us. There we go. Awesome. Before we go too far, we're going to make sure we got our fan down in there so it's happy and waiting for us. You can even start it on. Just get this started on here a little bit. Get our fan shroud lined up where it needs to go, which is right about there. I grabbed a couple of new because we had access to some. There's one. We're just going to snug all these up and then we can move along.

We're going to grab our washer fluid container. We've got a slot on the bottom and, of course, the two up top here. That should slide right in. Just give it a wiggle. Make sure it doesn't come free on the bottom. If it came free on the bottom, then you just missed the hole on the bottom. It's not a big deal. We've got our coolant reservoir. It's time to reinstall. Get this nub right here. It's going to go right down in there. This right here and then your lock slides right in here and locks in. Try to get it on there. There we go. Easy peasy. Take your hose, fill it up. We're just going to spin this on. If it doesn't feel like it's spinning on very easily, you might have just missed a tooth when you were trying to thread it on. Same tool that we used to take off the fan clutch, we're going to use to reinstall. I'm just going to turn it so I get a clear view. Get this onto the nut there.

Nice. You don't really need to hammer down on it. You just need to make sure it's bottomed out and then a little extra and then that's it because when the engine is turning, it's actually going to continuously want to tighten this, so you don't really have to worry about it loosening up on its own. Grab our upper hose, slide it right onto the radiator. Grab our clamp, slide it up here. Give it a nice tug. It's not going anywhere. It's exactly where I got it from. Awesome.

We've got our vacuum tool here. Just has a couple of hoses. One is for letting the air out. As the air rushes past, it creates vacuum which is going to vacuum our system, create negative pressure. You're going to notice that this gauge is going to go all the way up. It needs to go up to where 25 or anywhere past 25 and the green is. Once it's up there and it seems like it's holding steady, we're going to turn it off and we're going to let it sit and then hope it doesn't go down below the 25 into 20, 15, 10. If it starts dropping like that, then you know that you have a leak someplace. Here's our 25. We're going to keep going until the needle stops. See, that's just about it right there. Let me close this off. Turn off our air. Now, we can get our coolant ready and when we come back in approximately five to 10 minutes, we're going to make sure that this needle has not dropped below the 25 mark.

Okay, friends, it's been holding for a good five to 10 minutes here, so I'm just going to grab our coolant that we're going to be using. Got our hose down in there. We're going to let the vacuum fill the system. We're on gallon number three here. I'm just kind of holding it up because the pressure is getting... it's kind of evening out a little bit here. We don't have as much negative pressure in there to create vacuum. I'll just hold it up high, like I said, and that is it. We'll let that drain back out of there real quick.

If you don't have one of those vacuums for filling your cooling system, you can go with something like this. This is available at 1aauto.com. It's a little Funnel Buddy and it's got pretty much every single adapter you're ever going to need for pretty much any cooling system. What we'll do is we'll find the ones that'll work for this. I've already figured out which one it is. It's the black one with the big cap on it. We also have the little cap, we got the screw-ons for like a Volkswagen or a Volvo. You got a Ford over here. All sorts of neat things in there. I'm going to put all of these aside. We'll grab the pieces that we do need. I'm going to put this right on here. Push it down, give it a twist to the right till it's bottomed out. Put this on there just like that. This right here, it's just a little stopper. That's going to come in super handy a little later and I'll show you why.

Now, we're going to carefully put some coolant in this, just like that. I'm just going to use whatever coolant is left in these jugs that I might have left in there. I hate to waste anything and I definitely don't want to contaminate any landfills. Now, what you can do is you can either let this sit like this for a little while. You could also come over to one of your hoses, give a little squeeze. You'll notice that I'm getting out some pretty good air bubbles there. After you notice that there isn't any more air bubbles coming out, you can go ahead and run the vehicle for a little while.

Once you've run the vehicle and it starts to heat up, the water pump is going to be circulating the coolant. It's going to flush out any air that's in there. The air is going to work its way up to here, which is the highest point. As the air comes up, something is going to need to fill that void. That's going to be this coolant. It's going to work its way down in there. Once you've run it, you know it's nice and hot, all you do, take this, push it right in there like that. You lift up your little Funnel Buddy like this and then you go ahead and you put it right inside your reservoir.

If you end up needing more coolant, you're just going to add. The way you know if you need more coolant is by looking at the side of this. You have a minimum right there and a maximum right there. You need to have it somewhere between the minimum and the maximum. Anywhere above that is semi-dangerous only because once the coolant heats it, it has to expand. It's going to go somewhere. Last thing you want is it to come out of here and then to pour all over the ground, so I'm going to leave this right in here for now. I'm going to run the vehicle and we'll finish up what we're doing.

We're going to top off our coolant reservoir. You've got your low line and your max line. Let's get it anywhere in between here and here. Check it. Maybe a little bit more. You go a little bit over the max, it's okay, but you don't want to go very much over the max because you need room for when the coolant expands. When it gets warm, it needs to be able to come up in here and not come out of here. If it starts coming out of here, obviously it's going to contaminate the ground and it's going to cause issues. That looks great. Down the road you go.

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