Realized I was doing my car oil changes all wrong after 60K miles

My buddy's torque wrench check in his garage showed my drain plug was barely 10 ft-lbs over spec, and that's when I understood I'd been over-tightening every single filter for the better part of a decade, anyone else had that wake-up call from a simple tool?

1 comments

1 Comment

karenm4924d ago

...so my friend Dave, who's a mechanic, had this whole thing happen with his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law thought he was saving money doing his own oil changes for years, turned out he was tightening the filter with a strap wrench and basically crushing the rubber gasket every single time. Dave showed him the old filter and you could see the twisted, flattened seal, and the new one had a tiny oil weep around it almost immediately. He borrowed Dave's torque wrench and found out he'd been going about 15 ft-lbs over the factory spec, but the real kicker was he'd also been using that old trick of filling the new filter with oil, which is fine, but then he'd spin it on so hard the whole housing was cockeyed. Dave had to chisel the damn thing off because it was seized, and his brother-in-law just stood there with this look of total defeat, saying he'd done every single change that way for 80,000 miles. Now he brings his truck to Dave's shop and pays full price, just so he never has to touch a drain plug again.