I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe.
I've been doing a bunch of stuff on-and-off over the past few months, but I've kind of been all over the place and have not exactly finished anything I started.
I'll start with today and then try and back fill other stuff I have done since January.
When I first moved the car in January I had an oil leak. At first I thought it was leaking from the dipstick, but after removing and resealing it I realized it was the oil pan gasket that was leaking. Today I started to change the gasket without removing the engine following the steps I learned from this forum.
I placed a lot of wood on top of my transmission jack and lifted the engine by the oil pan. I had to do it twice because the floor is not level and the right side raises higher than the left. I placed a 2x4 between the motor mount and frame which gives enough room to remove the oil pan. The only thing I disconnected was the transmission shift rod as I was afraid it would get damaged and I removed the two bolts on the trans crossmember.
When I had everything cleaned up and was ready to install the new one-piece gasket, I realized I bought the wrong one. The one I bought is for an engine with the dipstick on the driver's side. My engine came out of a 1990-ish truck and has the dipstick on the passenger side. Managed to find the right one online and will hopefully pickup tomorrow.
When I did this the first time I made the mistakes of sticking the 2x4 too far in, then realized I was blocking the bolts on the pan.
Oil pan came out easy enough. Scraping all the old gasket off is the part I hate. That took a couple hours.
Had to flatten out some of the bolt holes because someone (probably me) must have over-tightened the bolts. I tried tightening them up before I decided to change the gasket.
Engine still looks pretty nice. Of course the furthest it's driven is 25 feet into my driveway and back.
I was a little surprised at how close the dipstick is to the crank, but it wasn't a problem before, so I'm not going to make it one now.
