2000 Dodge Ram 3500 Truck V8 5.9L Engine Water Pump DIY Solutions EWP00005

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

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

So, right up here is where the drain is or the petcock. I'll just show you with this hose, right up here. Okay. 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 it might work out better for you, but essentially we're just going to go over the end of that petcock. 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. I'm going to grab my bucket, a set of pliers. We'll get up in there. So I'm going to carefully take my pliers. I'm just going to give this a little wiggle side to side. I'm going to 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. Okay. We've got coolant draining. We're just going to give this a couple minutes to finish doing its thing and then we can continue.

So now what we're going to do is we're going to remove the clamp that holds the lower hose to the radiator. It's just a squeeze clamp. You can use something as simple as pliers. They also sell hose clamp pliers that are special for this, but regular pliers seem to work just as good sometimes, and it's what I had in my hand. Slide this down. Here we are. It's down nice and far now. I can move the radiator hose around on the radiator. You want to make sure you're wearing safety glasses, your mouth's closed, hand protection, and of course, you have a collection receptacle. And here we go.

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 hose clamp tool, just grabs onto the ears, give it a nice squeeze. Nice, my hose around. Cool. I'll slip that down. Of course, the serpentine belt's 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 and flashlight. Just give it a little wiggle, see if I can get it to break free from the water pump. Hold on, get it off the radiator side. Okay, 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 peak at it, make sure it doesn't look like it's all dry rotted and cracked. This one looks like it's reusable. Going to grab this. Just give it a nice little jerk in the upward direction, and it should want to break free. There it is. Hose holding it in, you got these right here, this right here, and then this little nub. Okay? So those just slide right into here. That's where the nub goes, and then of course down here. You 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. So there it is. Set this aside.

All right. So 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. So 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, right. We'll have to take off the serpentine belt, and then we can get to all 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 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.

Okay. So 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 right about here, just underneath where it kind of goes down at an angle. I'm going to go in with it, and I'm just going to lift up on my washer fluid reservoir, 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. So when I went in with the screwdriver, one right here, gave 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 airgun here. You can use something as simple as a ratchet. I like the airgun 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. Okay. Of course, doesn't seem like it's going to want to come off. Just going to try 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 twisted 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 on to 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.

So 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's come in handy more times than not. It's nice to have a full set of them. So you never really know when you're going to need them, could be a big bolt, could be a small bolt. If I can get that on there. So 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 you doing that, Len? Well, it's a good question, because we need to take off this fan clutch still. All right. See that big ol' nut down there? That screws right onto the water pump itself, and so obviously we can't have this thing flopping around in our way. So we're going to grab our tool, and we can continue.

Okay, so we're going to use our 36mm fan clutch tool, just goes right on this just like this. This part right here goes into your air chisel. Just going to get this right on here. 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 hole not 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 fins. So just have your hands ready to try to catch it. Odds are that it's not going to fall down in that direction, and there's quite a bit of space between the two, but couldn't hurt to at least try. There it is. Cool. So 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. Put that right there so we can't lose it. Grab our fan shroud, give it a little lift. I'm going to grab the fan, get this right out of the way ahead of time. Fan shroud, there it is.

Okay. So we have a clear view of what's going on now. You got your water pump right here, right. 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.

I'm going to 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. Could take our belt right out of the way. That way that 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. It this is all cracked up, you'd want to replace it. Generally speaking, more than six cracks within 1", which is about the size between my two thumbs, kind of means that your belt needs to be replaced. This one's in really good condition. We'll set it aside, and we can continue.

So now it's times to remove the water pump pulley bolts. If you have an airgun, that'll be real easy. Just put your 13mm socket on there with your airgun, zip them out. If you don't, flathead screwdriver or a pry bar, 13mm wrench or ratchet, whatever you want to do with the socket. I'm just going to go like this. I'm going to rest the handle up on top of the tensioner right here. I'm going to put the flat part on the threaded area of the water pump, and then I'm going to bring that bolt head down onto the screwdriver or pry bar, whatever you've got. I'm just going to put my 13 on, break it free just like that. Easy-easy. Now that you have that one nice and loose, it's going to give you even more of an area to grab onto so you can get the other ones easier. Okay. We'll just do the same to all these. We'll take them right out, and we'll get the pulley off of here. There's our four bolts. They all look the same. We'll set these aside.

Use our same screwdriver or pry bar, just go right in between here. Here's our water pump pulley. Just check it. If you look inside and you see a whole bunch of crud like this, you just want to chisel it out. I would do it right over a trash can just because it looks like it's a lot of rust and debris. Along the outside, just make sure that this outer portion of your pulley isn't super shiny. A little bit shiny is okay. You also want to make sure that it isn't super pitted. If it's all rotted and it's got a lot of pits or a lot of debris that's sticking up, you're going to either want to clean it down or simply replace it. Now would be the time.

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 going to close these a little bit more. Run that right up and out of the way. Awesome. Just going to grab the hose, see if I can get it to break free. Okay. Just give this a little wiggle. We 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 either 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 this point, you would just replace this.

Just going to do this a little bit. It's going to come up slow, of course. Here 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. So we're just going to clean up around here real quick 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 right 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. I'm going to try to wiggle it around to 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.

So, obviously, getting in here to get this out, you don't have to take out your fan shroud. You don't have to take off your pulley, all that stuff right here. Obviously, you would need to take off your serpentine belt to get in there, but more than likely you could probably get in and get this. It's just so much easier for video purposes and the fact that we're doing actually a couple different jobs here to just get it out this way. Essentially, I just want to show you how to get it out. You take out this bolt right here. You spray down in between where the tube goes into the water pump, give it a couple little wiggles, maybe a bonk or two, and it should slide right out for you. All right.

So what we're going to do now is we're going to remove the clamp that holds the hose onto the upper portion of the water pump right here. If your clamp is turned like mine is, it might prove to be fairly difficult to get out of there. I'm just going to use this one and see if I can get that hose clamp freed up. Wish me luck. Okay. That back there, this one right here. This little hose clamp tool right here works pretty good, generally speaking, except for right now where it's stuck in there. There, okay.

So, this tool right here works pretty good to get into tight places. I would've never have been able to get that out with pliers. We would've had to take the bolts out of the water pump and then hopefully drop it down enough to stretch that hose to maybe be able to get pliers in there. So if you can get yourself a tool that looks something like this, you'll be doing all right.

Continue, we're going to use our 14mm and we're going to remove all of the mounting bolts that go around the water pump. You're going to want to keep an eye on which bolts went where because some of these bolts are going to be a little bit longer than others as you'll notice as we start pulling them out. I'm going to go with this one's a pretty long one. I'll set that aside. Got ourselves another long one. Set that aside as well. You go in whichever direction you want. There we go. Got ourselves a nice short one now. Show you what it looks like in comparison. See, here's another one. Got a long one. Looks like it's the same length as the other two long ones, so that's good. I'm going to start stacking them a little higher up so I don't have to worry about them falling.

We've got some coolant coming out. Anytime you happen to see coolant coming out when you take out a bolt, when you go to reinstall bolts whether they're old or new, you need to make sure you use a little bit of thread sealant, and I'll show you that when it comes time to install. So pretty much what I would do is any one of these long bolts I'm going to use some thread sealant. That just means that they go into the coolant jacket, and you don't want any coolant making its way past all these threads and then coming out after you finished your job.

Got another short one. Another short one. I'm just going to feel along the bottom here. Got that one out, yeah. Come along here, yes. Up here, that one, this one, this one. All right. So it looks like we're doing all right at this point. We've got ourselves seven mounting bolts. So at this point we should be able to just give this either a bonk, bonk-bonk-bonk, try to break it free, or if you can find a place to pry, you could try to pry it off of there. Whatever you got to do to get the water pump off of the block of your engine.

So a nice little wiggle. Okay. The only thing that's holding this on now is just our hose. So I'm just going to try to grab my tool. What we need to do is get the hose to break free from the water pump. So I'm going to use a little bit of penetrant. I'm going to spray it and then I'm just going to pick at it a little bit and see if I can get it to free up. Get that out of here. Try to move that clamp. Once you get some penetrant working its way in there, everything should get a lot easier. Can see the hose moving around a little bit on the water pump, so that's a good thing. Means we're making steps in the right direction here.

Obviously I'm trying not to damage my hose at least as much as possible. Just trying to use this hose pick try to get it to break free. Obviously, this has been on here for a long, long time. It's probably original, so looking at about 23 years at this point. If you've been doing anything for 23 years, you're probably wanting to stay where you're at too. At this point, this should be ready, break free. Here's our water pump. Easy-peasy.

Here we are, friends, a quick product comparison for you. Right here, we have our water pump out of our 1996 Dodge Ram 1500. We just removed it. Over here, we have our brand new quality 1A Auto part. As we spin them around, you'll notice the area on the front, right. This is where the pulley was. That's where your fan goes onto. Our brand new quality 1A Auto part comes with a pulley built right onto it. You know what that means. You don't have to reuse your old one. A lot of cases, those old ones are rotted, full of debris, whatever the case may be. Booyah, brand new. Why not, right?

Comes with all the same mounting holes. You've got the area for where your coolant hose goes onto there. You got the area over here, and then of course, this part right here for the inlet tube. On the inside, which is where we started, you'll notice you have where your cooling fin is. This is the part that circulates. When you turn the outer part of your pulley, it spins the inner part, and that circulates your cooling. Brand new. This part's beautiful. That said, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a quality part to install onto the vehicle, so I want to go ahead and do it. As always, if you need this or any other part, check us out, 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

So now you'll notice all along your block you still have a lot of gasket left on here. You need to make sure you get every piece of that out of there, literally every single piece, because any spot that still has it on there, you're going to get a leak. So take some time, chisel it, scrape it, do whatever you got to do. You can use a razor blade. If you don't have access to a chisel or a scraper like this one, or a razor blade, I guess you could try to use a flat screwdriver. I don't know, I'm just guessing here really, but whatever you got that can try to get off the majority of this crud. You got to get it all off of there. This is going to take all day.

So what we're going to do first... get the gasket off of there for now, is we're going to get the hose right down onto here and get it clamped on. And then we'll just go ahead and slide our gasket in between, and we're going to put in the bolts. Before we do that, I just want to show you, we've got our short bolts here. It's important to remember where the bolts came from. Your short ones will have threads right at the beginning of the hole. Okay, so if there's threads right at the beginning of a hole like these two right here and the top center one, those are for the short bolts. If you try to stick your short bolt into one of the long bolt holes... nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Okay? So that's how you can tell. The short bolt doesn't screw into anything if it's going into a long bolt hole. There's four long bolts. They go all the way on the outside and then the three inner bolts are the short bolts.

So here comes the hard part. I'm going to get the water pump on the hose without pushing the hose up too far, but we need the hose to be so it's at least close, if not touching up against the water pump. Okay. That's pretty darn close. I'm going to grab my pliers. I'm going to try to bring that hose clamp down. That's our clamp. Okay. You want to try to put your clamp exactly in the same position as when you removed it. You should be able to tell where the clamp was just by looking at the way that the hose is, should have pretty clear markings where the hose was.

This one was exactly at this position. If you try to press just above the clamp, you should be able to feel the water pump right there. If you can't, then that means that the hose clamp isn't up far enough or isn't down far enough. You're going to need to squeeze your hose onto the water pump a little bit further and make sure that that clamp is completely grabbing on to the stud that's coming out of the water pump. This one's good to go. We can continue.

We're going to take our gasket, just try to weasel it right in there. Go whichever direction you want. Just be careful as you can to try and not damage it. There we are, just going to try to help this up to where it needs to go, a little helping hand here. Awesome. All right. Let's grab our bolts, turning right through here, try to make sure that I get it through the gasket. It's very important to make sure the gasket's in the right spot. Just going to line it up with the hole. Should be able to find that fairly easily, I hope. All right. That one's started, grab our gasket. Make sure it's still lined up everywhere it needs to be. That feels good.

I'll grab a long bolt, just go all the way over here. I know I've got it through the hole in the gasket because I'm feeling with my fingers on the back side there. You need to make sure you use a little bit of thread sealer, especially on the long bolts. I would use it on all the bolts. It's my recommendation, but you need to use them on the long bolts for sure.

All right. Now that we have all these started, we're just going to snug them up so they're bottomed out, and then we'll continue on to torquing them down to manufacturer's specifications. Bringing it nice and easy until its bottomed out. So we're going to torque these down to 30 foot-pounds. Okay I'm just going to go around one more time just for good measure. Here we are, 30 foot-pounds all around.

So 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 that in that hole, so I don't rip my seal. Now I'm just going to take it, bring it over here, just going to give it 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. We got our hose, just going to slide it right on there. Perfect. Squeeze this down. Got my pliers, just going to bring my clamp down the hose here. Just 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. All right. So it's time to get our serpentine back on.

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 make sure this is 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. All right. So let's get our serpentine belt tool on there. Ready again, make sure it's around all the pulleys exactly where you need it to be. That still feels great. Grab our tool. Awesome. I like to go like this a couple times. That's good. Make sure you take your adaptor off of there. Sometimes they like to get stuck. You don't realize it. You think you get your tool off. You leave this. You drive down the road and this thing goes into the fan, makes a whole bunch of noise. You think your engine's rattling apart.

Just double check, make sure your belt's in all the grooves going all the way around every single pulley. Obviously, there's no grooves on this pulley. Got a crank pulley, feels great. Tensioner pulley, great. Alternator, idler's no grooves, so that's easy-peasy. 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 just going to bring it right down. That's our fan. That washer 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. Can even start it on. Just get this started here a little bit, get our fan shroud lined up where it needs to go, right about there. Grab a couple of new bolts because we had access to some. There's one. All right. 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 then of course the two up top here. That should slide right in. Just give a wiggle, make sure it doesn't come free on the bottom. If it came free on the bottom, then you just missed a hole on the bottom, so not a big deal. We've got our coolant reservoir. It's time to reinstall. Got 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 seem like it's spinning on very easily, you might've just missed a tooth when you were trying to thread it on. So same tool that we used to take off the fan clutch, we're going to use to reinstall. Just going to turn it so I get a clear view. That's 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 oomph, and then that's it because when the engine's 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.

All right. So we've got some new clamps here, 1A Auto was nice enough to supply us with. Just going to put this on here, bring this around, get it up on there. Different clamps call for different size sockets. This one is a 8. Sometimes you'll notice they'll be 7, sometimes they'll be 1/4, so they come in all different shapes and sizes. Just make sure your hose is up on there all the way. It's getting close here. Once it kind of feels like it's getting a little bit harder to turn, you're probably pretty close to where you need to be. So, that feels probably pretty good right there. I'm just going to go a teeny bit more. Okay. Grab my hose, give it a nice tug and a twist. That's going nowhere. That's a great clamp right there.

Just grab the other portion of our hose. We can see the lower portion of the radiator there. Get this up on there, try to slide this onto the radiator. That goes on really good. Now we're going to snug this up, same thing like we did the first one. Okay. Feels like it's pretty snug, just going to give it teensy bit more. That feels good.

When you're tightening these clamps and it feels like it gets nice and snug, and you go a little bit more and all of a sudden it feels like it breaks right free, at that point, you need to remove the clamp. Take it right off of there, take the hose off and just replace the clamp. That means your clamp's stripped out, it won't hold. No matter if you try to retighten it up again or whatever you try to do, it's going to be garbage.

All right. So we've got our vacuum tool here, just has a couple hoses, one's 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 the 25 in 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 below the 25, into 20, 15, 10. If it starts dropping like that, then you know that you have a leak some place.

Here's our 25. We're going to keep going until the needle stops. All right, say that's just about it right there, going to close this off, turn off our air. And 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 build a system. All right. So we're on gallon number three here, just kind of holding it up because the pressure's getting... It's kind of evening out a little bit here. We don't have a much negative pressure in there to create vacuum. I'll just hold up it high, like I said... and that is it. So let that drain back out of there real quick.

All right. 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 go pretty much every single adapter you're ever going to need for pretty much any cooling system. All right. So 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've 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 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's left in all these jugs that I might've left in there. I hate to waste anything. and I definitely don't want to contaminate any landfills. So 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 anymore air bubbles coming out, you can go ahead and run the vehicle for a little while. Once you run the vehicle and it starts to heat up, the water pump's going to be circulating the coolant. It's going to flush out any air that's in there. The air's going to work its way up to here, which is the highest point. As the air comes up, something's 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 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. All right. If you end needing more coolant, you're just going to add it. 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 up, it has to expand. It's going to go somewhere. Last thing you want is it to come out of here and to pour all over the ground. So, I'm going to leave this right here for now. I'm going to run the vehicle, and we'll finish up what we're doing.

All right. 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. If 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 warms. 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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