Diagnosing the Coolant Leak 4.4L V8 Land Rover LR3 - Ep. 2

Hi, I'm Mike. Welcome to my Waffle Square, where I obsess about things and you get to benefit from it. Now, episode one of our refurbishing of this Land Rover LR3 is literally uploading in the house right now. And we're already out here in the garage working on our second video, which is going to be diagnosing the pretty significant coolant leak that we have in the engine. So let's get started. Now, here's the items I find to be helpful or essential to complete this task. I like having some snack bags or sandwich bags and a Sharpie so I can separate all of the various screws. For example, the fan shroud and the air filter screws. A cordless drill with an extension for the Phillips to get the air filter off. A small flathead. You're going to need nine 30 seconds, five 16ths, eight millimeter, 10 millimeter and half inch sockets. A strap wrench, fan removal tools, Loctite, a breaker bar with a half inch and three eighths inch head. A torque wrench that goes down to seven foot pounds. Panel removal tool and or a flathead screwdriver. Toothbrush, brake cleaner, five in one tool, razor blade, all helpful for cleaning up grime and scraping off old gasket sealer. You're going to need to purchase or rent a kit to pressure test the coolant system so you can find the leak. New serpentine belts, some sort of radiator flush, distilled water and the proper replacement coolant. So in our circumstance, we know that our leak is on the front of the engine. There are some circumstances where you could have head gasket leaks or things in the back like going to the heater core. Ours seems to be concentrated up front so far. So I wanna get as much access, visual access to this area right down underneath the fan shroud. So I'm gonna be removing the fan shroud, then the fan underneath it because in addition to checking for leaks, we are also going to be changing out the serpentine belts. I can't find any specific listing in the Carfax report of that ever being done for this vehicle. It's got 189,000 miles on it or so and they recommend doing that at about 115,000. So we're gonna take care of that while we're already rooting around in here. And if it turns out to be the water pump, then that'll be perfect because we will have need to taking those off anyway. All right, before I take the shroud and the fan blade off, let's get some more access by removing the box for the air filter and then the intake heading all the way up to the throttle body. So the first thing we're gonna do is take this 930 seconds and loosen this clamp. And then I want to pull out the plug for the mass airflow sensor. Now you can push down right here, but I have found it's a little easier and less likely to break it if you pry it up from the back and then slide it right off, just like that. And then we're gonna need to remove the, what is it? Six, yeah, six screws from the air box. Now I've got my awesome little grip mat right over here. That was a Father's Day gift and I just love it. Now, several of these are deep down in there. So I recommend an extension. Okay, I want to remove this breather tube right here. You squeeze on either side of it and it comes off of the intake pipe here. Now let's just pry this guy back. There we go. Now we can get this guy out of our way. All right, our fan shroud has two Phillips screws and then some clips that I'll show you in just a second. So let's get those Phillips screws first. All right, here's a picture of the metal tabs that the plastic fan shroud pop into. What you have to do is squeeze like you see here to release them out of those tabs. There's one right there and then one, two on this side. Just got to get it right around this coolant hose. There we are. Next comes removing the fan blade. Now, for that, there are some tools made specifically for removing the fans. I bought this one off of Amazon. I'll leave a link. There are some questions as to whether or not this was strong enough. That might be an issue if you have some rust. Say you live in the Pacific Northwest or you live in a wet, snowy area where there's salt on the road. This vehicle's basically never left Las Vegas, which is a very dry climate, and ours is gonna come off really easy. But if you look right down here where my hand is, you will see the nut that is 36 millimeter. Now, we need to turn that clockwise, usually a lefty-loosey, righty-tighty. It's the opposite for the fan because of the way it spins. This portion of the tool rests on the two nuts that are holding the fan clutch into place. And what that's gonna do is hold the fan clutch in place so as you're wrenching on this 36 millimeter nut holding the fan blade on, it doesn't just simply spin the fan clutch. Now, holding that in place, we come down here with our 36 millimeter wrench. This kit comes with a 32 and a 36 because vehicles are different. And then we're starting to break away. Now, that is a lot easier than I've seen it in several videos, so it leads me to believe that lots of people are in wetter climates than we have here. We're pretty fortunate. Now, if you're having that issue, you might wanna spray some PB Blaster or something ahead of time so that yours comes off easy. And then I saw this little trick. See how I'm just spinning it and the nut is spinning on its own? Now, before we come off all the way, now that we have the fan shroud out and we have access to it, we wanna pull the plug for the fan, which is right here. To do that, I'm gonna get right in there with my screwdriver, pry back that clip again, and just pull it right out. See that? Now we can free the electrical cord for the fan. Yeah, there it goes. Now, this gives us a pretty good view, especially when you consider the water pump is right up here, up top. But I wanna have all the belts out of the way so when we start to pressurize, I can tell if it's just coming out of the water pump or somewhere down below. And to do that, we're gonna be wrenching around here in a bit. So I'm gonna put a piece of cardboard down here to protect the radiator. And to hold it in place, I got just a couple things of duct tape just to hold it in the corners. All right, first thing to do is release the tension off the first serpentine belt. There's actually two in here. And to do that, we're gonna need a half-inch drive to crank this pulley against its spring tension so that we can remove the first serpentine belt. So I have a nice half-inch straight bar and it goes right into this little square here, just like that, perfect. And then you need to overcome that spring tension by pulling it this way. And then we can get the first serpentine belt off. And there we go. Now, instead of messing with it and trying to pull it past everything, we're gonna be removing this pulley anyway, which is necessary to get to the other serpentine belt. So I'm just gonna leave it right here and we're gonna take one half-inch bolt off of that. While I got it here, let's look and see what shape this guy's in. And boy, I don't see any cracking on the inside at all. I feel good about changing it out, but it wasn't about to bust, so somebody's been loving on this car. All right, I'm gonna put a half-inch on this breaker bar just to get it loose, and then I got a smaller ratchet to make quicker time of it. This time, it is lefty-loosey. Good, now you can see that cardboard's already paid for itself, dang. All right, out comes the pulley and the belt. The way to check this pulley to see if it's good, we already tested the spring tension and it was fine, but you wanna grab onto the pulley wheel itself and feel if there's any play, and I don't feel anything. So it doesn't make any noise when the engine's running, so I think this one is good to go. Now, that first serpentine was super easy. It basically just went around the outside of three components. The second one inside is way more complex. So I'm gonna take some time to document where everything loops and dives and climbs and crawls around that whole system before I just release the tension over on this pulley and take it off. All right, let's start at the alternator. It's the easiest starting point. So going up the top belt, it comes all the way up to the water pump, over the top of the water pump, goes all the way down to over there to the air conditioner, around the outside of that one and down to the power steering. It goes around the outside of the power steering and then comes up and around the main crankshaft and at this point, it inverts. See that? To this tensioner pulley. And now it's kind of inside out as it comes all the way down past this idler pulley and back down to the bottom of the alternator. All right, now that we got the tensioner and the first serpentine belt out of the way, let's take off this fan clutch because we're gonna need to take the bracket that it's attached to off to be able to remove the second belt. And to do that, we're gonna switch over to the metric system for the first time today and use a 10 millimeter. That just comes right off. All right, now this little guy here swings and is notched out so you can get to all the 5 16ths nuts and then up top, there is a bracket that has three bolts in it, two of which are the 5 16ths but this one right here in the center is a 10 millimeter. Let's get that one first. It holds a bracket that holds this hose assembly on. All right, with all those bolts removed, this bracket comes out. So these are slightly different than the two up top so I would leave them in there just like that. That way you don't lose them and you don't need them to come out all the way anyway. Now, as we look at this guy, I'm gonna inspect the bearing. I don't feel any play in it so I think this is in good shape. All right, so I got our breaker bar and now I'm gonna release the tension and remove the belt and I think I can reach down there and get the belt off of the alternator and I think that'll be our best bet. So I'm gonna push to get past the tension, reach down and get the belt right around the alternator. That was easy. Okay, ease back that tensioner pulley and let's unwind this serpentine belt now that we've tracked it. All right, before we inspect this inner belt, I wanna reach in here for this tensioner pulley and do the same test and it doesn't have any play and when we spin it, there's no sound of any bearings noise so we're good with that one too, that's great. All right, now it's real easy as we demonstrated here to remove the outer serpentine belt. I wonder if they took the extra time like we just did to get to this one. I'd have to say that looks just fine as well. So I wanna remove the pulley right off the front of the water pump so I can get a good look to see in there if that's where the leak is coming from but when I put the 516 ratchet on there, it just spins freely as you can see here. So to stop it, I'm gonna take this strap wrench I have and mimic the serpentine belt and hold it still so I can get those three bolts off of there. Yeah, there we go and there that comes. Next thing I wanna do is organize all the bolts so nothing gets co-mingled and then I'm gonna get down here with a camera and take a really good look at everything we can see where the biggest collections of fluid are. Then I'm gonna clean everything off in preparation for our pressure test so that we know as soon as possible right where the leak is coming from. All right, I got some brake cleaner and I got a little light to guide me around. I wish I could use the straw but there's not enough gap here so I'm just gonna be careful and spray off everything I can. All right, I'm gonna wipe all that off. Oh, before we even get to the pressure test, look at the freeze plug on the bottom of the water pump. There's like a piece chipped out on top and it's just open. You can see the green coolant just sitting there ready to come out of it. Now here is the replacement pump and when you look on top of that freeze plug area, you can see it's open as well. So if we look at the top of the water pump, there is a hole there and that hole and this hole by this freeze plug are connected so you can blow through that one and the air comes out here. So for water to be leaking out of that area, the seal behind this impeller must be bad on the existing water pump. So this thing of beauty is our brand new OIMERI 28 piece radiator pressure tester and it's got all these various caps for overflow tanks or if you actually still have a radiator cap on your radiator, you can put these on and then you take this unit here with its own gauge and you pump up the system to whatever is rated on the radiator cap, in our case, 16 PSI and then you go rooting around throughout the engine and the coolant lines and see if you can find where the leak is. This one also has a vacuum system. So when you've fixed the leak, you can test with vacuum instead of pressure and then once it's holding the proper amount of vacuum, then you can attach a line that goes right into your new coolant or in our case, it's gonna go into distilled water and radiator flush and it'll draw it into the system and should take out almost all of the bubbles. So pretty awesome. There are tons of these on Amazon. The reason I picked this one is in the posting, it had two different listings for Land Rover, which I couldn't find in any of the other ones. So if you look at the instructions right here, they have a great gauge, here's a closeup picture, where it lists out what each of these various caps go to and 12 and 22 are rated as going for Land Rover. Number 12 here is the bigger of the two and it's the one for our LR3. So let's move over to the overflow tank and let's hook it up. So we know we have a leak right there at the water pump. The question is, how big is that leak and could it really be responsible for all of the dripping we're seeing at the bottom of the engine? I've got a little action cam set up down here, pointed right at that freeze plug area. So let's take the cap off. We'll put on a pressure tester cap, connect on the quick release here and then I'm gonna pump it up to no more than 16 PSI, which is what's rated on the cap. We might not even get there. I'm not getting a good seal right here at this cap. So after some trial and error with other caps, I finally figured out it was number six that is marked Ford and Land Rover. And that one seems to be holding pressure really well. I don't hear any leaking coming out of here finally. All right, so we've confirmed that the water pump is leaking. What I can't necessarily confirm is there's nothing below that. But since the water pump is obviously the highest leak, I say we drain the coolant and change out the water pump. So I'm gonna release the pressure with this little tab right here. So next let's get underneath the car and I'll show you where to drain the radiator plug. All right, we're looking at the front of the vehicle on the passenger side. Here's the passenger tire. And to gain access to the drain plug for the radiator, we need to pull out this little side skirt. And it is held in place by four of these little plastic push pins. I have found the best way when those are inserted tight like that is to have a panel removal tool. You get in, pull the center part out to like that. And then you can get in with this panel removal tool and pop the whole thing out and then it's reusable. And once you remove that passenger side, you get a direct look right here at the bottom right corner of the radiator. And that little screw right there is our drain plug. So I'm gonna put a bucket under it. We're gonna unscrew it and off we go. Okay, I Googled it and there's supposed to be a full coolant system on the Land Rover LR3 should be nine and a half liters, which is like two and a half gallons. This is like a two gallon, just under nine and a half liters so I have this extra plastic bin here to catch whatever might spill over it. But I wanna have this guy to start catching it if it really starts pouring out, you know, just like we did with the oil. I got safety glasses on cause I don't wanna get it splashed in my eye, took my watch off. Let's pull this little drain plug out. Easy, all right. And that is slow rolling out of there. So next thing I'm gonna do is head up top and I'll show you what's next. And now that that's draining down there, we can open up this little plug right here on the coolant bottle. Well, even with the top plug out, it's draining really slow. I wonder what would happen if I put some pressure on the unit. Let's find out. Yeah, that helps, right? So we've got seven bolts, but only five to remove. Here's how you differentiate. Well, two bolts come installed on the water pump to hold it together. So we can use the new one as a gauge to find out which five we need to remove from the car. So for reference, I'm gonna set this water pump right here so I can see exactly which screws to remove and which ones to leave alone. Eight millimeter. There's one all the way out. Definitely using blue Loctite, that's good. And that's our fifth one all the way out. Let's see if we can just pull this thing off or if we're gonna have to pry it. Oh, no, I can't. Plenty of fluid coming out of there too. While that's dripping, let's see if we can push any more out. Yeah, look at that. Just by adding a little bit of pressure. All right. I see a bunch of gasket sealer all around that we're gonna wanna scrape off. I think the first thing I'm gonna do is get in here with some brake cleaner and really squirt out all of that disgustingness. I'm gonna get in here with an old toothbrush and really clean out all this grime because there's a bunch of kind of oily, grimy, stop leak residue where this bottom screw is gonna go and I don't wanna leak. Getting in here with a 5-in-1 tool and just scraping all that off. Well, all that grime there in the grooves of the top of the crankshaft pulley wasn't there when I pulled the water pump off, so all of that must've come out of the coolant system. Nasty. The port on the left, as I stand in front of it, still looks like it's got some coolant in there. It's slightly dripping towards where we're gonna be putting new gaskets. Let's see if I can pull anything out of there. Oh, yeah. Got about another whole liter by sucking out those two ports. Well, it looks like everything about these two water pumps, including the kind of plastic-looking impeller inside, are exactly the same. So I read the instructions on this new water pump and it stated that you should use a gasket sealer. So before I put that on, I took the time to rub everything down on the engine block as well as the gasket and new water pump with isopropyl alcohol, which might be overkill since I use brake cleaner, but what the heck? All right, everything got cleaned off with brake cleaner. Then I took a five-in-one tool, did the initial scraping all around where the old gasket used to be, followed that up with a razor blade to really fine-tune it, and we are ready to go. You can see in this picture here just how nice and clean that looks. I got all the RTV sealant on there. This is specifically made for water pumps and thermostats, so I've got a layer of it on both sides of the included gasket. Let's get it in there. Start getting some screws in place. Took the time to put a lot tight on these bolts ahead of time, so they're ready to go. And I'm just gonna get them all in there hand-tight and I'm gonna switch over to my torque wrench. All right, I've got my smallest torque wrench and it is necked down to a quarter-inch to accommodate this little eight-millimeter socket, and it's set to seven foot-pounds. There we go, there's one. I'm gonna do these in a crisscross pattern. Two, three, four, five. I'm gonna let that sit for 24 hours at least before I do another pressure test and then fill it up. Now, before we test the system, I noticed right up here on top of the engine that the air bleed valve is missing. It's just been bypassed with some sort of straight tube. And I'm gonna wanna use that when we're bleeding air out of the coolant system. So I got this OEM part, and as you can see right there, it has the air bleeder valve up top. Well, instead of using the pressure tester, this time we're gonna use the vacuum tester because it has two functions. Number one, it's gonna test the system for leaks. And number two, if we confirm that there's no leaks and it's holding vacuum, then we can hook a hose up right here that goes down into a bucket of coolant and water, or in our case, flush and water, and it will draw it back into the system. So this blue hose is hooked to our overflow bottle. Then this orange hose here is hooked to my air compressor. We're gonna pop this valve right here over. It's gonna blow air down, creating vacuum. If we can get to this 20 to 25 range, that's optimum. Then we will shut this guy off, and then we're gonna hold it and see how long we get a good reading. So here we go. Going quick. Look at this main coolant hose. It is pinched and sucked completely together. Same with this little guy right here. After only 25 minutes, we're down to seven in vacuum pressure. So I don't hear any hissing coming from the coolant bottle or the cap that we screw on for this system. Maybe it's something with the thermostat and we're still regulating out vacuum. Anyway, nonetheless, I'm gonna recharge the system and see if it will steady itself. All right, it's not holding vacuum. So I don't know if it's the cap or if we have a leak somewhere else in the system, but there's only one way to find out. So let's bring the water back in with the vacuum. I have already charged this line. Basically, I brought the water up to right about here and clicked it into place. That way we're not introducing a lot of air from the bucket down below. So let's get the vacuum back up where it belongs and we'll get started drawing the water in. I'm curious to see what it's gonna look like. That's it. Now let's suck the water in. It's doing a good job. I need to add some more water though. All right, I don't see any more being drawn up. So I think we're ready to shut everything down. You can see here, it did a pretty good job. There's the water and flush line right there. Now, before I put everything back together to start the engine and run that flush all the way through, I'm gonna do another leak test over here by pressurizing the system. Well, even with thread tape, I can't get the cap to hold pressure. It keeps leaking out of it. But what little pressure I am putting in there, about five to 10 pounds before it starts to leak out, hasn't resulted in any leaking up here or down below that I can see. So let's put it all back together in reverse order and run the engine. All right, everything's buttoned back up. Let's start her up. Got the temperature turned all the way up so we can engage the heater core. Well, we've been idling about 20 minutes and it's keeping normal operating temperature. That's a good sign that we probably don't have any air bubbles. So I think we'll turn it off, let it cool down while we check for leaks, drain it, and then refill it with proper coolant. About the most we're getting is over here at the coolant bottle at about 181 degrees, 150, 155 there. Well, this was always the spot for the telltale signs of leaks, and I don't see anything. It's bone dry down here. Now, optimally, while flushing the system, you would wanna be actually driving the car for at least 10 minutes with the heater on. But because I need to service the transmission and fix the air suspension, I didn't feel comfortable doing that. So just running it idle would have to do for us for now. So once I drained the system, I did refill it with this Peak Antifreeze for European vehicles. And I chose this one because it specifically says on the front, made for Land Rover Freelander Discovery Defender 1998 and up. And I would also recommend that you buy the concentrate rather than the pre-mixed because one bottle of concentrate and one or two bottles of distilled water is going to be a lot less than two bottles of the pre-mix. Now, if you found this video helpful, will you please give it a thumbs up? It really helps the algorithms to start suggesting it to more viewers like you. Also, please consider subscribing. There's a lot more work to be done on this vehicle and there's many more videos to come. Now, I'm gonna leave links for everything that we use in this video, including the exact water pump and serpentine belts. Now, full disclosure, all of those are gonna be Amazon affiliate links. So if you click on them and end up making a purchase, it won't cost you a thing, but I do get a small reward at the end of the month. It helps to justify all the extra time it takes to make these videos while working on cars. Now, I'd love it if you leave a comment or question below. I respond to all comments and questions. Let's take a look at a few from the last video. Josh writes, cool video. I'm in Northwest Las Vegas. My wife bought an 07LR3 V8 about two years ago. I've been doing all the work to it. I have learned quite a bit. I also have a LR number for spare parts. Have any questions? Hit me up. All the best, Josh. Josh, thank you so much. I would have never known I had somebody right here in Las Vegas that I could reach out to if I get stuck. Now, FT was not quite so impressed. So you spend $25 for a junk, look like your airbags on your suspension. You love the overpriced junk, not very smart. FT, thank you for your comment. May I suggest in the future, if you're gonna criticize someone for being not very smart, you at least try to do a grammar and punctuation check. SoCal South Bay wrote, Mike, congrats on your purchase. Disco 3 are very reliable. The minute you finish all the catching via maintenance, it will be worth it. SoCal South Bay, I hopped over on your YouTube channel and let me just say, keep surfing, brother. And finally, check out James Ray, who left a complete rundown of all the things he did to his 2007 Land Rover. And I'm grateful for everyone who left a video and all of the viewers as well. Our next video is gonna be working on that transmission cause I have all the parts and the replacement fluids and filters. So until then, thank you for watching.