Water pump Gates or GRAF

Gates all the way. I have just a basic timing kit and water pump and i auto-x mine in the summer. Haven't had a single little problem so far.

Geba, Hepu or Graf are all good quality and should all have metal impellers. I have been told that Graf is a little better quality, but I don't know.

Screw NAPA. Get a Meyle or Graf water pump, they meet and exceed OE standards.

I ended up keeping the gates kit, I've put about 8k miles on it so far.

Do you still have the original water pump? Those has plastic impellers that fail. Replace it with a metal impeller pump (Graf and Hepu are ideal).

I have a GRAF metal impeller water pump. so far so goof with it, i like it.

From my experience I have never had good luck with the metal impeller ones. The impellers won't break but the weight is too heavy for the shaft and the shaft ends up breaking and just free spinning. I've used 2-3 metal ones before (I am almost positive at least one of them was a gates brand) and they have all failed within 30k or less miles.

Okay, so I installed a new aftermarket pump in my MK4 Jetta 2.0 last year. Went with the seemingly highly recommended GRAF metal impeller pump that many forum members across multiple forums seemed to stand behind... 14K miles later and it's leaking. Anyway, after doing some more research, it seems that it's considerably more common for aftermarket metal impeller pumps (especially GRAF, but seemingly all of them from what I can find) to fail prematurely for some reason...

The stock pump failed back in Feb 2010, so i ordered a GRAF pump with metal impeller from ECS Tuning. Purchase was made on 1/27/10, parts got here on 2/03/10, and I installed pump late Feb 2010. Mileage was 127,257 when pump, timing belt, tensioner were done. In the middle of 2010, a loud grinding started at the front passenger side of the engine. I took everything apart and found the water pump with bearing grease or some waxy chunky crap all over the outside of it and on the inside of the timing belt cover like it splattered, and the pump leaking from the shaft. Car now has 135,362 miles on it, so thats complete pump failure within 8,069 miles.

I had a graff metal impeller waterpump start leaking from the weep hole about 2 months after replacement.