How did that happen? Scoundrel's guide to DIY vehicle maintenance for brain-donors

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by NIN

After reading this thread, I thought it about time to check my cars' oil and it seemed to need a slight top-up

.... Guess who's gone & overfilled it

I'm gonna have to use it as little as possible till Monday

Although it was messy, the problem was more easily fixed on a bike. With cars, you have to jack the damn thing up to get at the drain nut on the sump; and I have a morbid fear of going underneath a car. It doesn't require a lot of imagination to see how that could go wrong. Ramps are safer, if you've got them, and chocks to stop the car rolling back.

If you know someone who has a boat, they might have a bilge pump you could borrow, so you could then suck the oil back out neatly through the top and save all the bother of jacking it up, the mess and any risk of having the damn thing land on top of you etc etc.

There are all sorts of reasons why it's best not to run your car with too much oil in the sump. It might even blow your engine in an extreme case. If you do have to run it, say to go to a mechanic and fess up the shameful truth, so he can get you out of trouble, run it very gently, especially on any uphill gradients.

Sorry NIN: I didn't want to inspire anyone to follow in those particular footsteps of mine, but just the opposite.

[NIN]

Absolutely right , by exampling mistakes, perhaps we can help others avoid making them.

Thanks for the good advice & considering my problem Scoundrel, I don't need to go anywhere tomorrow.
It's absolutely my own fault as I didn't let the oil settle for long enough after running and added approx ¾ - 1 litre as it appeared to be half way down the dipstick - the only real dipstick being myself

I'm very fortunate that my Father is a mechanic & he had one of his workshop ramps installed in his garage at home when he gave-up the motor trade

The trickier part of my sorry tale is that when servicing the car a few months ago it was clear it had at some point been pretty badly maintained by one of the previous owners or a duff mechanic.
When changing the oil, it was obvious the sump had been over-tightened as quite a lot of aluminium was on the sump nut thread and to simply get the job done, we botched it back together with PTFE tape & siliconed over the nut (one of the reasons why I'd been keeping an eye on the oil level )
The intention being to make it good at a later date with a helicoil - seems it'll have be fitted sooner than anticipated.

[rotobott]

Not a vehicle but a smoke alarm. It had previously gone off while attached to the ceiling, judicious use of a hockey stick solved this, and I stuck it on the mantlepiece, it was going off again tonight probably due to a dying battery which I could not remove, judicious use of a hockey stick solved this

[NIN]

Hockey sticks can be expensive to repair ,
though not as instantly satisfying - I'd have set fire to the bugger

[billybunter]

Originally Posted by NIN

After reading this thread, I thought it about time to check my cars' oil and it seemed to need a slight top-up

.... Guess who's gone & overfilled it

I'm gonna have to use it as little as possible till Monday

Too much oil is as bad as too little. If it gets into the cylinders good bye engine.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by billybunter

Too much oil is as bad as too little. If it gets into the cylinders good bye engine.

This can happen but it's an extreme case; I think you'd need to overfill the engine a lot. I remember being in the workshop once for my bike to have something done and the bike before mine was poorly for various reasons. The mechanic let the oil out and hurriedly grabbed a second drain tray as far more oil came out than was quite right. The oil was also evil-smelling, a genuinely nauseating organic smell, rancid is the best way I could describe it; a little bit like EP90 gear oil gone really bad. The owner had probably made the same mistake I made and simply carried on regardless; it was a lot more drastic than adding most of a litre bottle when he didn't need to. The bike still ran.

The owner had previous "form". His brother had once prevailed upon this same mechanic to come out to his home and replace all the locks on his bike, because the keys were missing. He, as well as the brother, had watched the whole operation. When it was completed, a set of the keys for the former locks on his brother's bike fell out of one of his pockets.

The mechanic, from that day on, always called him "Gifted".

So when this deluge, equivalent to two full oil changes, poured out the unfortunate bike, the mechanic merely muttered: "F***ing Gifted. Why am I not surprised."

[billybunter]

It is rare, but it does happen. When I worked for Citroen a young lad put water in the sump the engine was scrap. Another person put water in the LHM tank. (LHM is the fluid that makes some Citroens have hydraulic suspension) It was a major job sorting that out.

[billybunter]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn

There is a very interesting book on how Citroen workers sabotaged vehicles made for the Nazi regime. The trucks were junk on wheels on purpose.

[otokonomidori]

My old man had a Citroen GS. One day he and my mother were about start out on a long journey so he decides he better check the levels on the car. 5 minutes later he comes back in and says to me, "fleetwood77 my son, where the f*ck is the radiator on that piece of French shit you told me to buy??" How he laughed when I replied, "It's air-cooled, you daft old bastard!!"

Another time he went out to go to work and came back in after 5 mins, "That f*cking bastard shit heap won't start!" says he. I went out and the car is sitting there idling?!?!
Turns out my father was so deaf from being a shipyard riveter in his younger days that he couldn't hear the engine.

[luddite]

I was a mechanic back in the 80's, and I had the misfortune to "have to" change the oil on a Renault 5. I removed the plug, the old oil stank! I removed the filter, it smelled OK. New filter, 5 litres of oil, I check the oil and it is way over the line! Then I notice that the idiots at Renault put the transmission in front of the motor! I had to refill the tranny and change the oil again. I'm glad I didn't start it - if the piston had come down and hit the oil I would have had to change the motor on my time and expense. At the time, most neighbourhood garages refused to work on R5's - another time I had to change the clutch on the same car, I looked at the book and the first thing you had to do was remove the spare tire!