Oil Pan Gasket Fiasco

[Anthony]

 

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.

 

 

Edited April 25 by Anthony

[sarookha]

I usually use Google to search this forum (and others), by adding ::reattaowners.com (or whatever site you want to search) after my query.  That forces Google to prioritize hits from the site you are interested in.

 

e.g. Oil pan gasket ::reattaowners.com brings up two threads