Archive for the ‘Preventive Maintaince’ tag
How to Save Time & Money doing your own oil change
This time of the year is great time to handle your automotive costs. Besides not buying a new car, one thing you can do is repairing your old vehicle. You can do this yourself with some easy to follow directions.
Some of these things that almost anyone can do is change the oil and filters. This only requires in most cases an adjustable wrench, and a very inexpensive filter wrench. You can get your supplies and tools at any automotive store. You should use 10W-30 in cars and 10W40 for trucks. This has to do with the vicousocity or thickness as the engine warms up. Your owner’s manual or auto repair manualswill tell you which one to use for your car or truck.
In addition you will need an oil filter. In every store they will either have a Chilton auto repair manual , or a little stand alone computer for looking up the filter number for you car. It will often have many different part numbers for the different brands like FRAM, Motor craft, Percolate etc – just pick one, they will all fit your application.
Once you have the oil, filter and tools, you will simply need to either jack your vehicle up or use a set of ramps. Place your collection container under the drain plug; turn it a few times with the wrench and the oil dirty oil will flow out. Now you can remove the filter with your filter wrench, install the new filter, and replace the drain plug. Now on the top of your car you simply need to add the new oil. Most cars need 4-5 quarts again this will be in your owner’s manual.
For certain cars like Mercedes and BMW that have an indicator light which tells you when to change the oil you might need an OBD-II Scan Tool or OBD-ii scanner to reset this indication. For most other makes and models you should perform the oil change every three thousand to five thousand miles. In addition if you are driving in harsh or dusty conditions you should also change the oil filter at the same time.
For under $10 you can do what most of the oil change places charge $30-40 dollars and probably save time by the time to figure driving there and back plus waiting around.
If you can tackle this you can probably handle many other basic repairs.