Life of Water Pump & Belt Tensioner

[autocrosser]

What is the consensus of the life of the water pump and belt tensioner. I have 90k miles on my 96 and like to do preventative maintenance rather than wait for a failure on these type items. Or at least have one on hand during trips.

I got caught with a thermostat sticking closed two weeks ago and the temperature ran up to full scale but I caught it as soon as it did. I guess both thermostats were bad.

[ucdavis]

Tensioner is easy roadside fix, but I doubt it'd fail suddenly; all of mine that have failed over the years have been by slackening off belt tension & I saw it coming.
H2O pump is not an easy roadside fix. You will need gasket scraper & anerobic sealer on hand in addition to pump. I'll carry those on next trip into Mexico, but probably not intra-US. (For Mexico I carry fsd, IP w/pmd, OPS, stat, Tech2... Ain't no service for this rig there.)

[tom.mcinerney]

The Helm manual for my '95 specifically states don't renew coolant pump unless it's leaking.
At 175K miles, my tensioner pulley spun noisily due to dry bearings. I made a lame effort to find new pulley/bearing--but fortunately failed. When I installed new tensioner assembly from dealer , I realized that the worn one was somehow 'sticking/ratcheting' , such that it was applying much more force to tension belt, and required 3-10 times as much effort to loosen....

[catmandoo]

my truck had a new motor put in at 260,000 and it just hit 370,000 and the waterpump just went.also the front seal on the ps pump started leaking and i replaced it but when i replaced the waterpump i noticed the ps pump had a lot of play so i just put in a rebuilt ps pump

[markz]

My water pump and tensioner in my 95 are original at 270,000 km.
Mark

[CareyWeber]

Last spring I replaced the bearing in the tensioner pulley IIRC I had about 120K miles on my truck.

Carey