Newbie, first truck oil change

my b i was crossing thoughts lol 3-4 gal is my Powerstroke





American Trucker

 

Tech school and every shop i have ever worked at....you can get it that tight by hand, useing a filter wrench will over tighten it.




American Trucker

 

10 gal is going to be average. get a pan that will hold at least 12 gallons. take a punch & hammer thru bottom of oil filter & let drain, then take off with filter wrench & hands. fill new filters with oil & after hand tight, I use filter wrench to snug good & tight. the bouncing & vibration will work those filters loose if just hand tight. they may not. but they can. besides ,if your doing all this yourself, you probably cannot get a good grip, with leverage to tighten as needed anyway. oil on hands, laying on back, does not have a lot of torque when tightening.

 

Just to add, I personally put oil resistant silicone on the thread of the sump/drain plug, this works a bit like loc-tite to prevent plug falling out, if it happens to vibrate loose. ( this is a Aussie 4WD tip, and I do it on all my vehicles for peace of mind)

 

I change oil every 250 hours in summer and 500 hours in winter. Do yourself a favour and, when doing your first oil change, put a femco plug in the pan. As far as tightening the filter goes, IIRC, fleetguard filters say right on the filter to tighten 1/2 -4/3 turn past hand tight. I use rotella 15-40 and only buy oil packaged in Canada because it come in 20 litre pails and my cats take 2 pails (40L). American packaged oil comes in 5ga (18.?) pails and 2 pails leaves me a few litres short. I don't fill the filter because it's a nuisance and is not necessary. My research has found that the oil passes through the engine FIRST, then goes through the filter, then passes the oil pressure sending unit. While it's possible that this information I found is wrong, I have never experience any ill effects by not filling the filter. If you DO choose to fill the filter be certain to fill the OUTSIDE and not the centre. The centre is filtered oil and if you inadvertently introduce contaminants to the centre of the filter, these contaminants will go straight to the pan and have to go through the engine to get filtered back out.

 

sorry to rape the post, licensed to kill ive thought about installing one of those femco plugs but had worries about doing so, guess they r ok hey?

 

They are better than "OK". In fact, there's a company just a few miles from me that often gets their oil changed in the city and they tell me that the outfit that does it charges $20 less if the truck is equipped with a femco. I wouldn't have a truck without one. Try one and you'll wonder why you didn't do it YEARS ago.

 

We have the ball valves on the oil pans on our trucks, and we use rotella oil. As far as engine choices most Cats are good I think, but we like our N14, our other trucks have volvo engines which arent bad engines but not as gutsy.

 

with your limited experience,think you should wait on buying a truck, most rookies with your experience dont make it, just read a lot of the post on "dont work for ???", most of them are rookie drivers that got there truck and didnt fully understand what was needed. please be absalutely sure of this before you do

 

Not sure about other engines, but because of the shape of the pan on my Cat I've got two drain plugs. Front one drains about 8 gallons and another 1 or so out of the back one.