Ford 3.5L / 3.7L water pump failures?

[Rust_Belt_Pete]

3.5 water pump leaks externally before it leaks internally. If you keep up on your maintenance including coolant changes and flushes it tends to last a long time, no its not 100k maintenance item unless your car was never maintained.
3.5 NA is practically indestructible brick without that DI garbage that can run forever.
Yes if you ignore the water pump weeping coolant your engine will eventually let go.
3.5 NA and the F55 or whatever its called tranny is an excellent combo for a daily driver and has plenty of grunt.

 

[Dave9]

^ When the water pump bearing, which is not lubed by coolant, wears and starts wobbling, this causes the seal to fail and let coolant into the oil. Coolant flushes are not a magic bullet. That might help the seal last a little bit longer but once there's the wobbling, it's of minimal benefit.

There is no "maintenance" to solve this, lots of people never noticed any coolant coming out the weep hole before their oil was contaminated. I suppose you could call it maintenance for people to check their oil before every drive or even stop and check it in the middle of longer trips, but this is not something most owners know or want to do, at least not these days... I do recall decades ago when my father took the family on vacation road trips, and he would check the oil when fueling up along the way, so once for every tank of gas. Once my 3.5L gets to about 75K mi, I'll be doing that.

 

[JeepRubicon2k3]

My beloved 09 Mazda 6 GT pumped all the coolant into the oil at highway speed around 120k miles and 13 months after coolant system service by Mazda per owners manual. My cousins Mazda CX-9 did the same thing. This was a massive financial hit and hardship for me. I try to inform as many people I see with the 3.7L that are still living.