05-15-09
The Never Ending Oil Change Story
A post about changing oil. Thrilling. I feel bad for Dan, his story about changing transmission fluid is coming up too. I would feel sorry for you, but I just don’t care that much about you. After someone tipped over my Full Throttle energy drink today I’ve had my Dickies shorts all in a bunch.
Choice of Oil
I chose AMSoil Synethetic 75w-90. Why? Well it’s a good brand I guess, it’s synthetic and it was at the nearby snake oil shop by my work. I suppose I could have gone with Royal Purple or Redline which they also had, but I didnt. I chose this. Here is the part where I should analyze some logic I made up and reinforce it with numbers showing AMSoil being superior to Mobil1 and Castrol Syntec. I just liked the clear squared off containers with the honey-like fluid with the blue caps. It brightens my day, puts a hop in my step. That could be the meth talking. LE 607 is very popular with the crowd on s2ki.com among the other leading brands, if I had found this oil locally I might have tried it. I am not a brand whore when it comes to gear oils, so maybe next time around I’ll try something else.
Choose Your Weapon
I bought two quarts in case I needed extra fluid to prime the fluid pump I was trying out. As most of you already know there are dozens of ways to get fluid from oil bottles to transmissions, differential pumpkins, transfer cases, etc. This particular pump is made by MityVac (model MV7241) and features an in-line hand pump apparatus with removable lines for, I imagine, for easy cleaning and storage. As one of the pictures depicts, the end tanks of the pump that double as fluid feed receiver/sender and swivel, which proves to be quite useful. When items like this fluid pump are being shown on a show like Trucks featuring legends such as Stacey David (my hero), it looks like the perfectly designed product with the automotive enthusiast in mind. In fact, it is so appealing it must trump whatever devices you happen to have, therefore you MUST have this device! And years later, when you see it for $10.00 at a local shop you jump at the chance to try it. In the past I have been less than impressed by fluid pumps with respect to transferring oil into difficult to reach locations, and holding together long enough to get all the fluid to where I want it to go before it leaks all over me, and then it leaks all over the shelf i put it on. For the rest of eternity.
A person is usually in a very awkward spot, pinned against the cold cement with only a few inches remaining between you and the steel floor pan of your car with that $300.00 undercoating option you splurged for that does absolutely nothing except look ugly and make turning bolts underneath your car that much harder to do. Bottles of oil with thick vinyl/plastic tubes sticking into them pulling the oil containers around as they please. It’s never a perfect scenario and a mess is always sure to follow using one of these devices, it’s just one of those things. And usually the plastic hoses they give you are WAY too long for what you really need, and by the time you have the .9 liter of gear oil that is necessary to fill your s2000 differential trapped in the pumping device, the feed line is already sucking air, desperately seeking back-pressure to keep that fluid moving along its way down the 2 quart capacity of tubing.
To remedy this in-line fluid capacity conundrum I cut both plastic tubes down to about 1 foot in length (illustrated above in the picture with the randomly-placed bottle of Monarch Rum, courtesy of my neighbor). I used this device to fill the transmission as well, and no matter how neat and tidy you try and keep the operation the oil from these fluid pumps gets everywhere, and these contraptions are never truly clean unless you brake clean the crap out of the exterior and interior of these lines. Cutting them down to size will definitely help, and for most applications, especially if you are working on your car on jack stands as opposed to a lift, you probably will never need the longer side of the tubes you have remaining. I’ll keep them around gathering oil on the garage floor somewhere, just in case. A room mate’s tool box is also a suitable location.
Do Work
As with any car purchase a few extra tools need to be purchased to get at the usual places. The differential drain and fill plugs are both 24mm and having owned an AE86 which also had 24mm diff plugs I figured I was covered with a 24mm 1/2 socket. Unfortunately the space in front of the fill plug is conveniently blocked by undercarriage, not nearly large enough to accommodate my Craftsman half-inch ratchet and socket. Checking my options at Craftsman I was able to come up with a 24mm and 22mm combo wrench. Unfortunately the 12 point design and perhaps not the tightest tolerances in manufacturing creates quite a loose fit on the fill plug, which on my car appears to have seen better days in past years, and it barely holds onto the corners of the plug. It works, but barely. I think next time around I may just use an adjustable crescent wrench. The plug does not require strong-arming to secure its liquid contents, it just needs to be snug.
Other than the annoyingly horrible fit of the $18.00 wrench, the drain plug magnet told me good story. The build-up of ferrous sludge on the magnet was very minimal and what you should expect from a differential in good condition with normal wear characteristics. The nice thing about a gear-type limited-slip differential is not seeing your investment slowly transfer from the spendy clutch plates inside of the differential to your magnet-equipped drain plug in the form of shavings and small bits like in the AE86. Those were the deeply disturbing days.
Fluid was dirty yet chunk-free, and I retrieved about .8 of a liter, what you should expect. Filling was nice with this pump device, you can swivel the end tanks to make sure everything is sitting securely and conveniently. Nothing more annoying than worrying about the quart of oil you are 
dipping into is tipping over. With the trimmed lines and articulating lines I am happy report this was achieved. A word of advice with this pump: long and slow pumps does the trick, and relatively few pumps to suck through a bottle of oil. And once you have everything buttoned back up a little brake clean sprayed on the one oily cooling fin and both diff. plugs does a better job than any rag will do. That goes for engine and transmission oil changes as well.
I told you I am long-winded.
