How many here change their own oil?

[Pete from Boston]

I find the oil change places to love the hidden upcharge, particularly for synthetic, to the point that I can't justify paying for the half-assed service described above. 

One funny thing in this is that they charge to recycle my used oil, yet are obligated to take it for free when I do the work myself. 

[J N Winkler]

I find the oil change places to love the hidden upcharge, particularly for synthetic, to the point that I can't justify paying for the half-assed service described above. 

One funny thing in this is that they charge to recycle my used oil, yet are obligated to take it for free when I do the work myself.

One rationale for this disparity is to give the private citizen oil-changer, who cannot be gotten at through a regime of mandatory inspections connected to business licensure, an incentive to be environmentally responsible.  This said, I don't usually take my old oil to oil-change places, because that can come across as a bit of a slap in the face to them ("I don't trust you enough to let you mess around with my car, but here's my stinky old oil which you can pay to dispose of"); the one time I can remember doing it was in Utah when I was just passing through and had no time to find a 24-hour community disposal site with a waste oil tank.

In this county you can take your household trash to the dump and they will accept it, but then turn around and fine you $100 for hauling trash without a license.  Thankfully they are not stupid enough to attempt the same with waste oil and other hazardous materials, but the acceptance facility for them does not (to my knowledge) have 24-hour access to waste oil tanks.

As an aside, there is some variation in courtesy checks from shop to shop.  I took my car in to Sears (the day before yesterday's oil change) for a rotate and balance and it got a courtesy check, but no adjustment of tire pressures even though the job was being done on a FWD car with higher inflation pressures specified for the front (30 PSI front/26 PSI rear in my case; I run these plus 4 PSI to accommodate temperature changes).  At the quick-lube place, the tire technician thought all four tires needed to be at 30 PSI (apparently pulling that spec out of thin air), but neglected to let air out of the left front tire, so I had a front axle with 34 left and 29 right, which noticeably worsened handling.  The general lesson is that you never know what a shop actually does unless you observe the work yourself.

I do almost all maintenance myself.  I don't necessarily enjoy working on cars, but I have issues trusting others and I do save a few bucks by only buying the parts/materials.  For major work, I have a mechanic that I know well and trust.  I know my personal limits and don't venture into areas that I know are beyond my capabilities.

When I was working on my Maxima, my main sources of information were the factory service manual (could be bought for under $100, which is rather unusual for such publications), a Haynes manual covering second-generation Maximas (hardcore shadetree mechanics say "I read Haynes manuals for a good laugh," but they are better than nothing and the one for Maximas explains some procedures that aren't in the factory manual, such as a transmission drain and fill), and an illustrated early 1980's Reader's Digest car repair manual that was useful for understanding basic principles that transfer from one model to another.  Now there are marque enthusiasts' forums with how-to libraries, YouTube videos illustrating common repair procedures, and even (if you are really lucky) bootleg digital copies of factory manuals.

I had no real experience with or, initially, any enthusiasm for working on my 1994 Saturn SL2, but just in the last month the kind folks at SaturnFans.com have helped me with a lot of overdue maintenance and repair jobs, such as the engine coolant temperature sensor (very important for good MPG in older S-series cars), thermostat, spark plugs, PCV valve, and torque axis mount.  Cash savings in labor cost so far are probably around $200.  They also have materials on water pump replacement that might have saved me an additional $240 in labor if the existing pump were not leaking heavily and on the brink of complete bearing failure, leaving me little time for parts procurement, let alone studying the work back and forth so I could do it properly first time.

[Pete from Boston]

Haynes are a good starting point that's small enough to keep onboard.  I recommend them to folks never planning on doing repair work so they know what the mechanic's talking about just a little.

[JREwing78]

And after that experience I am never going to Valvoline for anything again. Those jerkoffs stripped the plug on my oil pan and I had to get it replaced.

Yep. That was a $500 repair bill to fix, since it involved a considerable amount of disassembly of 10-year-old exhaust parts, and the freaking pan was $250!

Yes, I have rules against it in my apartment complex. But it's like 30 minutes to do the change, and I have it down to a pretty simple routine that doesn't leave a mess. I also have sturdy ramps to put the car on. I also feel the satisfaction of doing it myself.

[J N Winkler]

I changed the oil myself for the first time in my current car two weeks ago today.  The whole experience, as well as my after-the-fact discovery of BITOG, left me feeling like Rip Van Winkle.

I changed my own oil in my Nissan Maxima between 1996 and (approximately) 2005.  At that time I used Mobil 1 (full synthetic) with orange Fram filters.  It never really occurred to me to use anything else and the only new development I noticed in that time was the introduction of easy-grip surfaces on the back of oil filters, to allow removal and installation entirely by hand.  The main challenge was coupon-clipping to get Mobil 1 cheaply:  at the time it was generally sold by the six-quart case and a good price ranged from $20 to $24.  There was just the one formulation of Mobil 1 and the API service mark had slowly crept up from SG to SJ by the time I stopped doing my own oil changes.  (It is now SN for oil currently on store shelves.)  I maintained a 3,000-mile oil-change interval, so over that time the camshaft lobes and journals (visible through the oil filler hole) faded from dark mahogany at about 60,000 miles to old gold at about 227,000 miles.  I don't think I ever paid more than $3 for a filter.

Fast-forward to the present:  as part of preparation for the job, I purchased a new-design waste oil holding tank with pan recessed into the side, filter pliers, and Rhino ramps.  (Rhino, it turns out, is a trademark.  In the patch where the wheel rests, each ramp has a molding of a rhinoceros dancing the conga.)  All three turned out to be smart investments.  The Rhino ramps gave me easy working room with triple protection (parking brake, parking pawl, and bricks behind rear wheels).  The tank was large enough to intercept oil from the filter mount, which spills oil over a six-inch length of the frame since the drip rail cast into the back of the pan does not really work when the car is lifted by the front wheels only.  The filter I removed had been put in by the oil change place and although it wasn't really gorillaed in, it had no easy-grip surface and I had to use the pliers.

Shopping for the consumables, however, was much more of a challenge.  Full-synthetic oils have undergone a stealth price raise--the going rate is about $25 for a five-quart jug.  Choice has expanded to the point where it is hard to know what to buy.  At Wal-Mart you can find at least one type of full-synthetic oil from each of the majors (Valvoline, Shell, Castrol, Mobil, Pennzoil, Quaker State), and for Mobil 1 alone there are now at least three types:  Mobil 1 regular, Mobil 1 Advanced Economy, and Mobil 1 High-Mileage.  I took a stab and picked the third because it seemed to be the cheapest, but Wal-Mart defrauded me (price marked on the shelf was $22.80, while price actually scanned at the register was $25 and change; it was not worth $3 to me to spend half an hour to find one of Sam's minions and ask for satisfaction).  Its main selling point, I learned later from BITOG, is an enhanced additives package that includes seal sweller.  It is not a bad choice for a 20-year-old car still running on original seals that were rated for 12 years, but such a varied selection even at a big-box discounter has the perverse effect of making it difficult for a customer to leave feeling he or she has made the optimum choice.  The problem is even worse if you go to an auto parts store, where you can get esoteric brands such as Royal Purple (favored for enhanced sludge removal), or online, where Amsoil--still the purists' choice--is readily available.

As to the oil filter, now that orange can of death and its acronym OCOD have found their way into general-interest Internet slang dictionaries, nobody can admit to buying an entry-level Fram filter without getting defensive.  Fram has conducted a major PR campaign to try to convince the customer base that high failure rates are a thing of the past, but it has been very slow to take since these filters still have cardboard anti-drainback valves.  Even an improved OCOD will now set you back almost $4, and for my car the purists' choices are now Wix and Purolator (in that order), which don't leave much change from $10 unless you coupon-clip or exploit quantity discounts.  I wanted a Fram Tough Guard, which held onto its good reputation even through the OCOD scandal and costs $5.94 on the shelf at Wal-Mart.  In the end I had to settle for an Extended Guard ($8.97), despite its being more filter than I needed, because Wal-Mart does not put its stock availability online (at best you can search their website and find out whether a given SKU can be picked up at a particular store), and the shoe-leather costs of looking for it elsewhere would easily have eclipsed the price difference.

On BITOG I discovered that you now have to do a lot more peacocking if you want to run with the cool guys.  It is not enough just to buy full-synthetic oil.  You have to have a good reason for using a synthetic oil made from crude oil feedstocks, since these are considered tantamount to dino juice.  This is the selling point for Pennzoil Ultra (feedstocks from natural gas) and Castrol Edge (informally "German Castrol," so called because it is formulated to German standards that do not allow a oil to be labelled full-synthetic if crude feedstocks are used).  To be a serious player, you have to be running on a custom oil-change interval which you have designed by experimenting with different combinations of oil, filter, and change interval and sending the old oil off to be analyzed by a commercial lab (Blackstone's seems to have majority market share).  When people want to brag, they cut and paste verbatim from the remarks sections of their used oil analyses (UOAs).  And God help you if you ever admit that you used an OCOD in the past and that your engine survived.