Mountain Top break down

[DirtyLarry]

What a drag. So, Friday a couple buddies and I headed for the mountains for a weekend of fishing, wheeling and camping. This would have also been the maiden voyage for the new 6” lift and ORD rear shackle flip on my ’78 K10.

Anyway, the truck ran like a top on the 150 mile trip up our favorite spot near Mount Antero (Buena Vista, CO) although I heard a weird chirp followed by a weird low tone pop noise under the hood once and a while, which I didn’t think much of since the A/C was on and it was hotter than heck. We get to the trail head, air down the tires and start on our 1.5 hr trip up the trail to our camp spot to drop off my buddies stock Silverado before the trail starts to get nasty. Truck still ran fine all the way up. The next morning I started it up and it was knocking like crazy plus the serp belt was squealing like a scaled dog but knock didn’t sound like a rod knock. We yanked the serp belt off and spun all the accessories and found nothing obvious. Put the belt back on and the noise was there again but slowly went away. At that point I was suspecting the serpentine belt tensioner but decided to head up the trail anyway so we cruised up the trail about another mile (at 2 MPH in 4 low) and it really started making a racket. Now that it is sounding this bad I decided to take it back to camp as it was obvious the truck was not crawling off the mounting until whatever that terrible noise is was fixed. Finally got it back to camp popped the hood and used pry bar as a stethoscope to listen to the engine. The noise actually sounded like the water pump but it wasn’t leaking, feeling loose or anything. The only strange tell tail sign was the water pump pulley was as smooth and shiny as chrome.

We decided to hop in my buddies Rubicon and make the 2 hr trip to Salida to find parts. Good luck with that on a Saturday. Thankfully, the NAPA there had everything I wanted. We picked up a water pump, belt tensionor, idler pulley, coolant, sealant, metric tool set because.....of course, I didn’t pack any metrics in my stinken tool box! AGH!

Finally we get back to camp and throw on the easy stuff first….the tensioner and idler. Nope…that isn’t the dang noise. So we replaced the water pump and the noise was GONE! What pisses me off this the engine is a new crate 454HO with only 5K miles. I actually replaced the original GM standard rotation water pump with a NAPA water pump for a late model C/K truck reverse rotation as I am running late model C/K truck accessories. Of all my wrench spining years, I have never saw a NAPA pump fail at such a low mileage nor have I ever saw a water pump make this king of noise without leaking or haveing end shaft play. Weird stuff. The nice thing about GM stuff is how easy they are to work on. Replacing a water pump on the side of the trail at 10,000 ft with no facilities or any luxuries. Ah, yeah.....remember that metric tool set. That SOB kit didn't even have a 15MM that would sure have made replacing the belt tensioner easy!

So, Saturday was shot in the arse because of running up and down the mountain chasing parts. Sunday was better but we didn’t have much time to play as we had to hit the road to go home. This trip sucked.

And after all that the only pictures I got is one of our camp the night before we had to bust out the wrenches and another of us airing the tires back up once we hit the main road.