Oil Changed

July 9th, 2008 · No Comments

Thanks to the awesome folks over at the MopowerStyle Forums I was able to get all my questions answered and get the oil changed in my car without any problems.

The first thing I did was go out to the auto parts shop and get a new Wix oil filter. Dave Schultz (Old Hippie over at MopowerStyle) recommended using this instead of Fram. Then when I got home, I put the new oil filter on the car. It was a bit of a pain to reach down in there with those big headers in the way but I managed to get it on and tighten it up (hand tighten only!)

Then I took back out the oil drain plug and cleaned it up and cleaned the hole up also. I put the drain plug back in and torqued it up to 20 pounds per inch as per the chassis manual instructions for this car.

Then the fun part - I took off one of the Mr. Gasket header evac valves and saw that right under the hole is a baffle to prevent the oil from pouring out under hard acceleration (or deceleration since this is the passenger front side). That baffle made it slow going, but I managed to pour the oil into that hole without any problems.

I poured in one quart at a time and after each quart checked around the car for any leaks and also checked the oil dip stick. The first four quarts didn’t even register on the dip stick. After pouring in the fifth one, finally there was the tiniest smudge of oil at the very bottom of the dip stick. Then after the sixth quart the level was right between the "Add Oil" and the "Full" lines. At this point I fired up the engine and let it run for a few seconds. The oil pressure gauge was reading at 75 pounds per inch which is good.

Then after shutting the engine down I checked the dip stick - the oil level was way back down (as expected) so I proceeded to add a seventh quart to the engine. Right now the oil level is just a tad past the "Add Oil" line. I’ll leave it like that unless I hear otherwise from the people over at MopowerStyle.

Interesting - the Royal Purple motor oil… actually is indeed purple. I didn’t expect that.

Of course I took some pictures of the process. I know - whoop-de-doo… it’s just changing the oil! But you never know someone out there might find these useful… so here goes: