How hard could it be - take off the pulley - remove 3 capscrews, wiggle the old water pump out, then slide the new one in, replace the capscrews and pulley, replace the belt - I'm in business.... How wrong could I have been... Everything went well until the 'wiggle the old pump out' part.... After about 6 days of frustrating intermittent pushing, pulling, hammering, etc., the pump finally came out, begrudgingly. I had to remove the radiator and cooling fans, but that gave me better access to the pump. There was no way it was going to move by prying it axially, so I resorted to applying torque to the pump body with a pipe wrench, rocking it one way, then the other - I used a 2 ft piece of 2" pipe to extend the wrench handle to multiply the torque I could apply. I also ended up hammering on the pulle

Notice the flanges are missing...

Thankfully, I had a pipe wrench narrow enough to fit in the snout.
y flange once the pump started to rotate. There was great risk of damaging the cylinder block, which would have been 'game over'... After cleaning up the bore for the pump body (lots of o-ring stuck to the surface), the new pump slid right in, and I was back in business within an hour. I've included a couple pictures to illustrate the issue.. I used LOTS of Liquid Wrench to help dissolve all of the corrosion between the cylinder block bore and the pump body.

 

Jeeze !!!

 

OH MAN!!!

 

That's rough! Wow.

 

Mine was the same way. I see you too broke off the ears. I had used a very sharp wood chisel to get behind the flange and kind of pry it out. A year later I swapped out the 2.3 for a 2.5 DOHC, and would you know it, it was already froze in. This time I went in the thermostat opening of the block with a piece of pipe and drove it out, without breaking it. It came out easily that way.

 

I had the same problem with my water pump, it took 2 days of force to break it free. I tried prying and broke two of the ears off. Ended up torching it and using pry bar to hit the shaft which broke it free. Granted, it looks pretty rusty lol (yes i actually use coolant). Original pump with 217k on it. Pain in the...