After looking at the box of new hoses for the last 5 months, I got around to changing them out this weekend on the 2004 with 75K on the odometer. Pretty straight forward, some interesting words were created in the process, but not to horrible.

One interesting element... trying to get the hoses off that go into the firewall for the heater core was a complete nightmare.... the rubber was stuck on the pipes (on the firewall side) and pretty much had to be cut/scraped off with a knife and scaper....

Anyone ever run into this before? How have they dealt with it? I ended up cleaning off as much as I could with a knife and scaper, then using brake cleaner to get the balance of the rubber off.

Also, out of curiousity, does anyone know what kind of metal the heater core pipes are made out of? it's silver, but looks to be something pretty heavy duty and doesn't corrorde. Doesn't actually look like Stainless Steel.

 

If those 2 heater hose are still soft, and they should be, I would leave them alone. If you tug or twist to much, you will call a leak at the o-rings and then you have a problem.
That being said, do you know the proper way to refill and bleed the coolant system?

 

I was able to just cut the hoses off and clean the residual rubber that was stuck on there.... in hindsite, I may have just left them on as you suggested.... I was acutally very very careful about not tugging and pulling, exactly for that reason.

Yes, I actually followed the bleeding procedure as set forth on this website sticky. Which was the second time I have drained and refilled the system since I got the rig at 55K miles. So the DexCool is fresh with distilled H20.