Water pump AISIN or OEM FORD

Aisin. The bearings in the idlers are better, the tensioner is better, and the water pump wont fail on you in 20k miles.

I just replaced the water pump on my 2011 today. Took me about 1.5 hours and was 150$ from Amazon. Aisin pump.

Replace water pump. 100% oem or aisin.

Use a good pump like a Aisin, cause you don’t want to do it again in a year.

When I bought Aisin water pumps for some of my other Toyota/Lexus vehicles, the embossed Toyota emblem on the pump would be ground off.

Get the Aisin one off rockauto, I just replaced mine with it.

You can save yourself some time and money by buying the Aisin water pump / timing belt kit on RockAuto. Don’t mess around with other ones. The parts are all the same OEM you’d get from Subaru at a fraction of the cost, except for the pump itself — but that’s a good thing because while Aisin didn’t make the pump for these, they were an OE pump maker for Subaru and the company that made the OE one for that generation (Gates) has apparently started producing crap. I don’t think Subaru even uses them anymore for their OEM pump.

Awful design by Ford to put the water pump inside the engine. I almost bought one of these used a few years ago, but backed out after reading about 3-4k jobs to replace a water pump at 180-100k miles.

Pretty sure this is the motor that needs the engine dropped to do waterpump and timing components. Bad bad design

The 3.5 5th generation Explorer has an internal water pump driven by the timing chain. It’s an enormous pain to change requiring significant disassembly (nearly 12 hours of labor) and generally includes replacing the timing chain in the process since you’re already in there, plus when it fails it can easily mix the coolant with the oil and destroy the engine, all that’s keeping them apart is a little seal.