questions about the steps to replace the water pump inlet pipe.
Edited again to make it more of a tutorial.
The following work was carried out on a 94 with a 1.8 please keep this is mind if you own a 1.6 as some directions may be different.
So the story starts when my car's power steering went to sh*t 3 days ago. At first I thought the pump or belt that had gone but upon opening the hood I notice that the belt was damp and had been skipping. Looking around the belt I noticed a drip coming from from the bypass hose. "No biggie" I thought a cheap hose and new clips and its all good... wrong still dripping, in fact as I tugged the pipe to get the old hose off it got worse.
So logically thinking it must be the L shaped peace that sticks out the Inlet pipe. It must have a crack or the join has corroded. So I ordered a new gasket, O-ring for the heater pipe and a new Inlet pipe. All official Mazda products as I really just want to do this job once.
So the basic steps I took were...
1 drain the radiator.
2 remove the intake, air box and heat shield to get some light and space. (I've got an aftermarket manifold so this should help)
3 disconnect the rad hose and bypass hose.
4 undo the 2 bolts connecting it to the water pump.
5 the heater pipe is push fit so it needs to be pulled free.
6 replace the gasket and O-ring on the heater pipe. you wont need any liquid gasket however take note some cars had a paper gasket so make sure to remove any broken off parts before you fit the new metal item.
7 insert the heater pipe into the new Inlet pipe.
8 Bolt the new pipe onto the water pump and torque to 14-19 ft-lbs
9 reconnect the hoses, put on the intake.
10 and finally refill the coolant.
Additional notes:
For owners of cars with power steering you will need to pull the pump clear to gain access. The fastest way to do this is to remove the long bolt and nut that the unit rotates on (located behind the pulley and on the reverse side.) and the bolt above that that's part of the tensioner assembly. With these out a bit of force will be able to pull the pump free of its bracket.
While you don't need to remove the AC compressor keep in mind that the lower bolt is hard to access so when tightening you might have to use a bit of guess work.
If you find removing the By-pass hose to be a pain just remove the top clamp near the thermostat then when the old pipe is free you can use a small screwdriver and some WD40 to free it. This tip can also be used on the radiator pipe as I found that 19 years of gunk had almost sealed the two parts together.
This is also a good time to think about doing a rad flush if you want to save yourself a job when it comes service time.
