About two years ago I had "The Dale" in a shop for a problem with the emissions system. Like those shops seemingly always do they found stuff that needed to be done that totaled, bless their heart, more than five-thousand dollars. With the power steering rack, water pump and the oil pan gasket all leaking it sounded, at the time, like a terminal diagnosis. The most expensive of the repairs was for the replacement of the oil pan gasket. Kid you not.
The conversation went some thing like, "...doing the pan is a fairly labor intensive project...we have to lift the engine partially out of the car to get at it." Attempting to sound unflummoxed, I politely told him I'd pay for the emissions work but I'd pass on the myriad other recommended repairs. Seeing they charge $125 for diagnostics I really appreciated the free heads up. "Hmm", I thought, "lifting the engine out of the car...this could be interesting". How could I possibly pass up on something like that?
Would it have been fiscally prudent to sink that kind of money into a, at the time, seventeen year old car with some 150,000 plus miles on it? Honestly, to keep the good old boy on the road the work needed to get done but not at that rate. If I didn't think I could do the work myself I'd shop the repairs around to get a break. You'd get a second opinion from doctors why not get one for auto repairs?
Although hardly environmentally responsible, I didn't dive in and replace the gasket immediately since it wasn't leaking that badly. Sure, I'd have to add maybe a quart of oil between changes and top off the coolant every now and then, the power steering rack hasn't given me any trouble, but everything was quite manageable. At least up until about six weeks ago when the wife noticed massive amounts of oil on the driveway that resembled the world's largest Rorschach Test. This picture here is after I scrubbed the driveway; oil was literally ponding on it. To make matters worse I had lost roughly three quarts of oil in the three weeks since I last changed it. These blobs on the driveway telling me that it was time to put my money where my mouth was. Immediately.
It's by no means a complicated job but what makes it cumbersome is that the oil pan is blocked by the engine mount bracket on the passenger side of the engine. This is the bracket looking up into the engine from under the car. The engine mount itself, a massive hunk of rubber, bolts to the bottom of the bracket and then to the aluminum sub-frame the engine, transmission and steering rack sit on. You can't remove all the bolts until the engine is supported up top with an engine lift or "cherry picker"; if you do the engine would come crashing down. The cherry picker is also used to lift the engine up about four to five inches so I could get the bracket and mount out after unbolting it. Toughest thing about any of this is getting at the bolts for the mount - best to have small hands, fortitude, and time. It wasn't easy and the fear of rounding off a hard to get to bolt slowed me down big time. One bit of advice, "break" or loosen all the bolts before removing them. Best to know they're all loose rather than get stuck on one that won't budge with several removed.
Surprise, surprise, this repair is not something that's covered extensively through youtube videos. This video here is about as comprehensive a study on the project as I could find out there and it's got its flaws like most DIY videos do. Our well-meaning host glossing and mumbling incoherently over many important details like sizes of bolts and techniques but at least it was something that could help me connect the dots on a job I never knew even had to be done let alone done before.
I won't bore you with the myriad trials and tribulations of a job that took me the better part of three weeks to complete. It took that long because of Covid-19, other projects, cold weather, laziness, losing parts, not having the right tools, time sucking trips back and forth to Autozone, and Lowes, being super careful, blah-blah-blah. Watch the youtube video and you'll get a pretty good idea of what I went through. All in, start to finish, if I didn't dilly-dally I could probably bust this out in about five or six hours. The one thing I can tell you, honestly, is that you do have to have a certain degree of mechanical intuition and aptitude to do something like this. If you really don't think you do, don't even think about it. Shame it's such an expensive repair to do. I wonder how many otherwise perfect running GM "W-bodies" with the 3800 engine have been scrapped over the years because of a steep repair estimate to replace, of all things, the oil pan gasket.
Old cars will seemingly bleed you to death with endless repair bills but it's still less expensive than replacing the whole car. I do not believe it's wise to fix a two-thousand problem with a twenty to thirty thousand dollar solution. I'm lucky too in that I can do a lot of repairs myself and I actually enjoy doing them. This job ran me about $150, and that included the gasket, lift rental and tools I had to buy. The net savings is off the charts of course since I got estimates ranging from $800 to $2,000 to do it. Best is "The Dale", now with 215,000 miles on it, rocks on. That's my older son, who's now twenty-three, on the day I first got this car going on ten years ago.
It's by no means a complicated job but what makes it cumbersome is that the oil pan is blocked by the engine mount bracket on the passenger side of the engine. This is the bracket looking up into the engine from under the car. The engine mount itself, a massive hunk of rubber, bolts to the bottom of the bracket and then to the aluminum sub-frame the engine, transmission and steering rack sit on. You can't remove all the bolts until the engine is supported up top with an engine lift or "cherry picker"; if you do the engine would come crashing down. The cherry picker is also used to lift the engine up about four to five inches so I could get the bracket and mount out after unbolting it. Toughest thing about any of this is getting at the bolts for the mount - best to have small hands, fortitude, and time. It wasn't easy and the fear of rounding off a hard to get to bolt slowed me down big time. One bit of advice, "break" or loosen all the bolts before removing them. Best to know they're all loose rather than get stuck on one that won't budge with several removed.
Surprise, surprise, this repair is not something that's covered extensively through youtube videos. This video here is about as comprehensive a study on the project as I could find out there and it's got its flaws like most DIY videos do. Our well-meaning host glossing and mumbling incoherently over many important details like sizes of bolts and techniques but at least it was something that could help me connect the dots on a job I never knew even had to be done let alone done before.
I won't bore you with the myriad trials and tribulations of a job that took me the better part of three weeks to complete. It took that long because of Covid-19, other projects, cold weather, laziness, losing parts, not having the right tools, time sucking trips back and forth to Autozone, and Lowes, being super careful, blah-blah-blah. Watch the youtube video and you'll get a pretty good idea of what I went through. All in, start to finish, if I didn't dilly-dally I could probably bust this out in about five or six hours. The one thing I can tell you, honestly, is that you do have to have a certain degree of mechanical intuition and aptitude to do something like this. If you really don't think you do, don't even think about it. Shame it's such an expensive repair to do. I wonder how many otherwise perfect running GM "W-bodies" with the 3800 engine have been scrapped over the years because of a steep repair estimate to replace, of all things, the oil pan gasket.
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