Mine was "Forest..er" green! Ha

Here are a few of those lousy ramps!

Now, after you read a number of my stories you will begin to get the idea that I might be a complete idiot when it comes to automotive projects.  My Brother and Cousin Greg can almost get a pile of metal, forge the parts, hone the piston housings, completely rebuild  transmissions with one eye full of ATF (Automatic Transmission Fluid) and pretty much diagnose anything that goes wrong with an automobile.  YES, they will still have a handful of nuts and bolts left over, but the thing runs.  These are the guys I hang out with and so I feel like I’ve seen and been around garage work enough to start getting confident in my abilities as well.  

It all started innocently enough with the changing of the oil in my Subaru Forester back in 2000.  I had a home with an attached garage so it was pretty easy to set up my ramps to drive the front of the car up onto.  That way I could get underneath the car easier to loosen the oil pan bolt.  I even had one of those rolling floor pads that you lay on to make the work that much easier.  I put the oil drain pan under the bolt and let her loose!  As the oil drained I rolled out from below and popped the hood to the engine bay.  I reached down and removed the oil filter and replaced it with a new one.  By that time the oil from the pan had stopped flowing and I dropped back down under the car to place the bolt back in the hole.....I snugged it up with my fingers but didn’t tighten it with the socket wrench to the appropriate torque.  I was distracted and I rolled out from under the car again and began to fill the engine back up with the right amount of oil.  I completely forgot to torque the bolt!  After I finished filling the engine with oil, I cleaned everything up, pulled the oil pan out from under the car, threw out the empty oil bottles, wiped my hands with some orange oil gunk cleaner and shut the hood to the engine bay.  In my mind, job done.  In reality, setup for disaster in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1....I went and sat in the driver’s seat of the car and started the engine to let it run for a minute or two before I let her down off the ramps.  It kicked over no problem.  It even ran smoothly without a hitch....for a few minutes.  Then, out of the corner of my left eye I noticed that there was a “Lake Superior of oil” growing out from below the car.  It was already within 5’ from the side of the garage and spreading quickly!  I thought, holy crap!!!  What did I do wrong?  What happened?  I immediately turned the car off, which was now starting to “ping, ping, ping”....I wonder why, hmmmm?  I now had another problem.  How was I going to get out of the car and clean up the mess, that was now running out the rear of the garage onto the driveway, without getting my shoes all oily?  There wasn’t any way I could avoid it and I stepped in with both feet.  Squish - slip...Groin, squish - slip...back goes out and I eventually made it to the big bag of oil soaking material every garage needs readily available....Kitty Litter.  I don’t own a cat, but it will absorb things that nature won’t have anything to do with.  I started spreading that around and it was soaking it all up thank goodness.  Ugh, what a mess!!!  I got a squeegee and started pushing the barriers of the lake back into the kitty litter.  I worked on that for about 2 hours until I was able to get it under control to some degree.

Now that it was cleaned, to the point I could walk around and make crunchy sounds instead of squishy sounds, I was ready to roll back under the car and tighten the lousy bolt!  Whew, that was an adventure...

Nope, not over yet!  I only had the one car that was up on ramps and had no oil in the engine and I didn’t have any EXTRA oil to put in and refill the engine.  Who would think to buy 8 quarts of oil when you only need 4 to do an oil change right? right?  NOBODY WOULD!  Why, because they would have tightened the bolt on the oil pan BEFORE they filled the engine!  I had to call a friend to come and take me to the local gas station so I could get 4 more quarts of oil and, as you can imagine, I didn’t hear the end of it for months!

WOW!  Still to this day, it’s 2012 now, I have a few crates of oil in my garage, just in case!  Ha Ha case, get it?

JC aka Pennzoil stock owner.