Several months ago, I drove out to a place to hike and bike here in New Mexico. The last four miles of the trip were on a dirt road. Some parts of the road were in such bad shape that it seemed like I was driving over an old-time washboard. I slowed down for those portions of the road, but evidently I didn’t slow down enough, for my car started leaking oil and transmission fluid shortly afterwards. I didn’t hit anything in the dirt road; it was the vibrations from driving over those portions that caused the leaks. These definitely weren’t “good vibrations.”
I therefore did what everyone who was raised in the conventional suburban way did: I took my car to a local garage to repair the oil leak. It was AAA approved, and their branch I previously went to in a different part of town (when I worked in that area) did a good job, so I thought they would too. Boy, was I wrong!
(I took my car to a different shop for the transmission fluid leak. The rear main seal needed to be replaced. They did a good job, though I occasionally see a dribble of transmission fluid on my garage floor. At least working with the transmission shop wasn’t a nightmare like the one I am about to describe.)
When I got the car back, it was still dripping oil. I brought it back for them to work on it some more. They kept screwing around and delaying the outcome. I finally took my car back. At least they refunded my money.
A friend who has been encouraging me to be a prepper sent me this video on how to install an oil pan gasket myself. I watched it a few times and decided that I could do it. I had changed the oil all by myself for the first time a few months ago, so I thought it wouldn’t be much trouble to install the oil pan gasket.
I started by putting the car up on some front wheel ramps in my garage. Then I opened the oil pan plug to drain the oil. I then undid the bolts holding the oil pan onto the rest of the car. I had to stop and walk to a local AutoZone branch to buy a torque wrench on the advice of another friend, and then walk again to O’Reilly’s (closer to home) to buy a six-inch extender for the torque wrench and the socket wrench set that I already had. While SurvivalBlog encourages people to get out of cities and live in rural areas, it saved me a lot of time to be able to walk to those shops. Living in cities, even bright blue cities, has some advantages, sometimes.
After finally getting the oil pan off the car, I put on the Victor Reinz oil pan gasket I had ordered from RockAuto. It took a long time to arrive because they sent it via FedEx. I learned at work that FedEx doesn’t always do the job that it’s supposed to do. Sometimes it’s easier and faster to shop locally.
I was able to scrape off the old sealant and put the gasket on the oil pan. The previous mechanics had managed to break another bolt so that it was stuck inside the hole where the bolts attach to the engine, and another bolt-hole had been de-threaded so that bolts inserted there would spin around but not stick. Nevertheless, I managed to attach the oil pan back to the car. By then it was around 8:30 PM; I elected to eat dinner. Since my oil drain pan has no lid, I covered it with aluminum foil before sacking out for the night to keep dust from getting into the oil.
The next day I poured the oil back into the engine and started it. Oil leaked again.
At that point I gave up. Yes, some people told me about easy-outs to remove broken bolts, but I don’t trust myself to do that correctly. I was terrified that I would make a mistake and screw up the oil pan or, worse, the area where the oil pan attaches to the engine.
I took my car to another garage. They told me that it’s normal for my kind of car to lack an oil pan gasket; Toyota uses their own form of sealant to attach the oil pan to the car. The mechanics used that OEM sealant to reattach the oil pan. They were also able to extract the broken bolt and fix another bolt hole which was somehow de-threaded by the previous garage. Yay – no more oil leak!
One lesson: just because it’s possible to purchase an oil pan gasket for your car doesn’t mean that the manufacturer uses one. I should have done more research instead of just going with that one YouTube video, which showed how to remove an oil pan gasket and install another one, but didn’t mention that some brands of car don’t use an oil pan gasket. I’m sure I could have purchased and used the Toyota OEM sealant, but that would have left the problem of removing the broken bolt and rethreading the other bolt hole.
Another lesson: AAA approval doesn’t always mean that the garage is good. Talk to your neighbors, family, and friends. One of my neighbors told me that he had also had problems at the garage which caused me such a headache. Had I known that earlier, I would have saved myself a lot of time and frustration.
A third lesson: Be a lot more careful on dirt roads!
I learned more about how cars work, and now I’m more comfortable with crawling under my car and tinkering with it, but beyond a certain point it isn’t worth the trouble if you didn’t grow up tinkering with cars. At this point it’s better for me to focus on what I can do: I can cook and I can grow a garden. It’s easier for me to learn abstract stuff thanks to my political science background, so I’m learning more about finance and studying for an exam that might get me a new job in that field. In other words, I decided that repairing my vehicle myself was no longer worth the time I was spending. Yes, I spent money to have the car fixed properly. The blogger Commander Zero is right: we’re much more likely to need $50 bills than .50 caliber ammunition. Yes, I could have spent that money on buying precious metals or other preparedness items. However, sometimes it’s worth spending money to have the peace of mind knowing that a job is done correctly by people who know what they’re doing.
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