How to Replace Radiator Hose 1997-2008 Pontiac Grand Prix

Brought to you by 1AAuto.com; your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet. Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20+ years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly, that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video, we'll be showing you how to replace the lower radiator hose on this 1998 Pontiac Grand Prix with a 3.8 liter; pretty much the same procedure as most of this era of Grand Prix with the 3.8 liters. Tools you'll need are a jack and jack stands, a 13 and 15 millimeter socket and ratchets, pliers, and a flat blade screwdriver. Ideally, what you want to do is drain the radiator first. You go up under the driver's side, driver's front tire right there, and you will see a little green petcock right there. You basically unscrew that with a pair of pliers. On this vehicle, the ears on that just broke off, so we end up actually doing the secondary way, which is just pulling the lower radiator hose off. To pull the lower radiator hose off, you want to go up underneath the passenger's side. It's a little difficult to see. There's an air flow right there. Pull that out of the way. You can see the hose right there. The arrow is pointing to the hose clamp. What we're going to do is reach up in there with a large set of pliers. You can see here, a nice large pair of pliers. The clips basically have ears on them that you grab onto with the pliers and you squeeze, which expands the clip. Ideally, you want to pull the clip off of the hose and then slowly pull the hose off the radiator so you can drain the radiator in a controlled manner. As you can see here, I'm basically pulling on the clip, and what happened was the clip was just stuck to the hose, so the whole hose pulled off at once and it drained very quickly and not in a controlled manner.

Not the ideal situation, but you can see I have a drain pan underneath and I managed to catch at least a majority of the fluid that came out. Now what you're going to do is use a 15 millimeter wrench and hook it onto your tension right there. Release the tension on your belt and remove your belt. Your belt tension is held on by a 13 millimeter bolt, so remove that, and then remove your tensioner, which gives you access to the hose where it's connected to the engine. Now you can use pliers to reach down below and grab the clamp. You can see that, actually, the tensioner and belt are back on there because when I did this originally, I was able to get the hose off without removing those. But believe me, remove the tensioner and the belt first. It makes everything a whole lot easier to get to. You can see me struggling right here to get the pliers down there, if you can see through my head. Get the pliers down there. Squeeze onto that clamp. You can see my arms kind of wedged down in there. On these cars, the clamp is kind of positioned down at the bottom, so basically, it's an exercise in getting the pliers on there. Basically, you can see, I'm just grabbing onto the hose, shaking it, and pulling it off.

Eventually it comes off for you. The easiest way to get this back in here is to use stainless steel band clamps rather than the original clamps. You can see how I've just got them on here. Put the hose down in. You may drop the lower one off of there, but it's not a big deal. Put the hose in. With that tensioner out of there, you can easily see. It goes on right there, and push the clamp right up into place. You can see we've got the hose on. We've got our clamp in place. We'll reach down I can't really film this because there's not enough room, but reach down and put the lower hose onto the radiator spout. It's kind of a work-by-feel thing. Once you have that pushed on, just check where the hose goes and where it routes. Make sure it's not touching anything. Then just use a nice long screwdriver I'll pull that up just a little more. It's easy to get to. I'm going to tighten up the other. I'm just going to use a ratchet and socket with an extension to tighten it up a little more. Here I'm going to reinstall I'm going to fast forward through reinstalling the belt tensioner and the belt. Again, it's a 15 millimeter bolt. Tighten it up on there.

Then route your belt. Make sure you have your belt routing diagram. Route the belt back where it goes. Put your 15 millimeter wrench on there. Pull the tension off, and your belt's on. Now down below, I've got the hose on and the hose clamp in place. I'm just kind of using the screwdriver to get it into a good place where I can work the screwdriver on there easily. Again, using the stainless steel clamps that use a screwdriver or a socket and ratchet is a whole lot easier than trying to put it back together with the original spring style clamps. Now what you want to do once that's tightened up, you want to wipe everything down so that you get rid of all the drips. That way, you can start it up, run it, and make sure that you're not getting any leaking from anywhere. Depending on how much coolant came out when you drained the radiator, if you drained it looks like probably a gallon came out there. Now I'm going to refill the radiator. This car is running its Dex-Cool, so I've got mixed Dex-Cool here. Add, then run the car some, let it heat up. The way you check it on this car is it should be when it's cold. The fluid's up to here. We'll clean this off a little bit and we'll go from there. You just want to run your car a little bit, let it heat up, make sure there's no drips, no loose clamps or anything like that, and you should be all set.

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