I recently performed an oil change on my wife’s Jeep Liberty CRD, as I’m an almost total “do it yourself-er” when it comes to car maintenance (NOT that I have any real skill… I’m just too cheap to pay for this sort of thing!) Usually that is a good thing. Today, I wonder however. It seems that when I pulled off the oil filter the rubber gasket stayed behind, and I installed the new filter right over it. This created a poor seal which as you can imagine, leaked oil.
Thankfully this condition was caught before things went REALLY wrong, but boy… what a mess. Sort of tossed a huge monkey wrench into my day’s schedule too.
Of course being a cheapskate once I realized that there was no damage done I was ticked off that I’d just wasted a few quarts of brand new oil! 😉
No photos sorry. I didn’t have my camera with me but if you do a google image search for “Exxon Valdez” and mentally erase the water, you should get a pretty good idea of what the scene looked like. Thankfully I had just bought a 50lb bag of “Oil-sorb” for use out in the BioDiesel home brewery in the barn and it was still in the back of the pickup truck! I think I used up 1/3rd of it.
Above: Just subtract water!
At least I’ll not make THIS mistake again!
Try to not EVER do what I did, whilst working on a XK 120: drop TWELVE quarts of oil onto concrete. You think a coulpa quarts goes a looong ways? Oh, wait, Messr. Goolsbee…wait.
😉