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I generally follow whatever recommendations I see from GM, but this time it failed spectacularly. A service bulletin from the '90s said to upgrade the oil pan gasket to their new design from AC Delco which is supposed to be so good that you can even reuse it. The first thing I noticed was that it didn't fit very well. It was floppy, hung over the edge in places, and getting it to stay in place while installing it was like trying to make a fish sandwich while it's still alive. The instructions that come with it and in the bulletin say to torque the bolts to 10, then 16. This seemed to squeeze the gasket out, and deformed my new pan. It started leaking and progressively got worse, so I ordered a new gasket. This time I ordered the Fel-Pro PermaDry Plus. This gasket is a solid piece that doesn't flop around or squeeze out. It comes with 4 handy helpers called SnapUps that you screw into 4 bolt holes, and they hold the gasket and the pan in place in exactly the right spot, freeing up your hands to put the bolts in easily. Once you get a few bolts in, the SnapUps just unscrew and you can put the last 4 bolts in. Incidentally, I tried doing a search for "oil pan" on this site, so as to avoid make a duplicate thread, but the search doesn't seem to be working. It returned zero results, even though there is another thread on that very page about oil pan bolts.

If you look at Reatta Facebook groups you can see a lot of the threads are about someone parting out a Reatta. I guess the reason for that is parts are getting so expensive for a Reatta, both new and used, that people don't want to spend the money to fix them. What does that tell us? Are Reattas parts, and paying a mechanic to keep them up, getting so expensive that the threshold where a Reatta should be parted our versus trying to fix them up getting lower? Or does it mean that less people are interested in them and figure there is more money to be made parting out an old beater than trying to sell them? The way it's going the only people who are going to own a decent Reatta are people that can afford to pay big money for a low mileage Reatta to admire, brag about, and drive occasionally. The days of buying a Reatta as a cheap car seems to be over. Yeah, you can still buy a higher mileage Reatta at a good price, but after you spend the money on parts and labor to get it in good condition, your cheap driver isn't going to be so cheap. Especially if you have to pay a mechanic to do the work. My advice to Reatta owners who plan to keep them, is buy up all the parts that you can afford right now that are on Facebook and hang on to them because the price of those parts is going to get much more expensive and harder to find as the number of Reattas dwindles because of people parting them out.

Like most things, it sometimes makes no sense. People are repairing, or at least trying to repair, Reatta's that should be parted out and others are just the opposite. Seemingly decent cars that deserve some TLC are being scavenged and discarded. Definitely well under $1k for a running parts car, much less than that for a lawn ornament, unless of course it has exactly the stuff you need. Mixing and matching colors, inside and out, or model years with incompatible content really limits the usefulness.

The good thing is that the 7th generation Rivieras had many mechanical parts that will fit on our Reattas. They made a few more Rivieras than Reattas.

You guys may be right in your assessments, but sure is distressing.