which water pump to buy?
 

Greetings All,
I'm am wondering what's the best water pump to put in my 2000s? From what I gather looking at old threads there is something of a controversy on the merits of metal vs. plastic blades. Does Mr Raby have killer pump in his bag of tricks? I'm thinking of replacing mine as a preventative measure since it has almost 100,000 mis. on it.
What say you?

Lots of threads on this.

Buy a Pierburg (OEM supplier), same as the one in the Porsche box for a lot less. Metal impellers are fine if you don't mind the risk of boring a hole into your engine casing.

Rick nailed it.
All the shop owners & mechanics on here subscribe to this as well, with the view that the pump is a put on a replacement schedule to mitigate chances of bearing and impeller failure.

Add another for Pierburg.

I replaced mine with an OEM from Pelican.

I bought an OEM one from Sunset Porsche. Once every four years I'll pay a few extra dollars. For what I am not sure.

There are three general options. Genuine Porsche, Pierburg (OE is also Pierburg, might be the same part as the Porsche supplied pump) and other aftermarket pumps with metal impellers. There are probably other options as well, but those are the only ones I would consider. I would not get a generic pump from the local auto parts store.

The advantage to the metal impeller pump is that if it fails it will not send impeller blades into the coolant passages, which can lead to big problems, like the OE plastic impeller pump. The disadvantage is that if that pump does fail and the bearing fails the impeller can hit the engine case and damage it. I have heard of plastic impeller failures causing big problems, but haven't seen actual metal impeller failure damage, perhaps because not as many are used.

Personally, I got a Pierburg when my original pump failed (bearing started to wobble and make noise, but impeller was OK). From comparing the original and Pierburg pumps, they looked identical down to the markings. In general, I always go with OE parts.

I bought the OEM (plastic impeller) kit that includes the low temp thermostat from Pelican. Hard to go wrong with this kit.

All good advice, but when you have just bought a '99 model and it's only been driven 39K miles in 18 years, do you think it's a good idea to go ahead and change the water pump due to its age and not how many times it's spun around?

Yes,
Age can be equally or more detrimental to components on these cars.
It's a hard pill to swallow but many times when you replace parts as maintenance, you kick yourself when what you pull off appears to be in perfect working order.
You can only reassure yourself that your just trying to stay ahead of parts failure

+1 Pierburg and low temp thermostat

Laso is also an OEM pump here in The Uk/Ireland. I recently replaced mine with this and it was almost identical in every way to the one that came out except the Porsche logo was dremelled off. And a lot cheaper to buy it.

While ur at it, stick in an L&N engineering low temp thermostat and new belt. Check the pulleys for wear and if wear is present they will need replacing as they will wear the belt. This will also be seen on the belt being replaced.

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