Thaco
03-11-2019, 08:47 AM
Just a really odd thing i came across this weekend, figured i'd share in hopes it may help someone else in our Canadian arctic winters.
Typically i have ignored oil change dates and just done the oil change based on mileage.
I have a 2000 Yukon 1500, 340,000km, rarely gets used just a beater truck to haul my RV in the summer, typically sits in the winter, so it only gets about 5000km on it all year so i just change the oil in the spring every year. However i have been driving it this winter because my other car got written off by a stupid driver, and my bus stop is a 5 minute drive so i drive to the bus stop.
Anyway, Monday last week i went to hop in before work and fired it up after it had been sitting since Thursday (had other arrangements on Friday) and my dash lit up, no oil pressure, and i could hear valve tick, which commonly happened before but would clear up after 5-10 seconds once the oil got to the top of the engine.. but this time i scraped my windows and it still hadn't cleared up, probably close to a minute... so i thought Shit... what now, lol. Checked the oil, it was fine, so I went to researching possible issues, lots of things pointing toward bad pressure sensors/sending units, even a couple professional opinions suggesting that. but i knew that wasn't it because the oil would still cycle if the sensor was bad, it would just have lights and the gauge would be on the ground. So after some searching i found a common issue to be the oil tube pickup gasket, seemed to be a common failure point and seemed to point at the symptoms i had. So i grabbed the gasket, whopping $3, lol, whatever, but then i had to also buy a oil pan gasket... that was a different story, $90 for that, damn. but it is what it is so i head to my buddy's garage with the gaskets and oil change supplies, we lifted up the truck to drop the oil pan, started with draining the oil, so i tossed the pan under and pulled the plug, walked away for 10 minutes, came back and the oil was just barely dripping out, but there was only a couple liters in the pan, thought it was odd but moved along, this is a big job, gotta drop the front diff to get the oil pan out, couple hours of working and cussing and the oil pan was free, lowered it down to pull it out and oil splashed on me, not unexpected but it was a lot, once we got the pan down, we saw it was half full of oil still. So at this point we thought maybe there was just excess sludge that had prevented the oil from draining, so we dumped the pan out and started cleaning it up with rags and a scraper, then we saw crystallization in the bottom of the pan, there was ice in there..... ice means water, so somehow condensation had build up to the point where the pickup tube was actually submerged in ice, and therefore unable to suck oil to bring it to the top of the engine. Was the first time me or any of the people helping had ever experienced this, realized afterward the issue could have been resolved with an oil change, and never would have happened in a warmer climate, and there was really no way to know what the issue was without dropping the pan anyway... i am still kinda confused why it didn't happen sooner, it's been -20 for a month straight and it just happened now. But anyway, we changed the o-ring anyway, because, why not? common failure point, got it all apart, it was $3, so whatever. put it all back together with a fresh filter and full synthetic, and it runs like a top now.
So, lesson learned, even if its a very low usage vehicle, the date for oil changes does matter, i still think 3 months is bullshit, but maybe 6 months at least.
You can flame me if you want for improper maintenance, it's all good, if this helps anybody it's worth it.
Typically i have ignored oil change dates and just done the oil change based on mileage.
I have a 2000 Yukon 1500, 340,000km, rarely gets used just a beater truck to haul my RV in the summer, typically sits in the winter, so it only gets about 5000km on it all year so i just change the oil in the spring every year. However i have been driving it this winter because my other car got written off by a stupid driver, and my bus stop is a 5 minute drive so i drive to the bus stop.
Anyway, Monday last week i went to hop in before work and fired it up after it had been sitting since Thursday (had other arrangements on Friday) and my dash lit up, no oil pressure, and i could hear valve tick, which commonly happened before but would clear up after 5-10 seconds once the oil got to the top of the engine.. but this time i scraped my windows and it still hadn't cleared up, probably close to a minute... so i thought Shit... what now, lol. Checked the oil, it was fine, so I went to researching possible issues, lots of things pointing toward bad pressure sensors/sending units, even a couple professional opinions suggesting that. but i knew that wasn't it because the oil would still cycle if the sensor was bad, it would just have lights and the gauge would be on the ground. So after some searching i found a common issue to be the oil tube pickup gasket, seemed to be a common failure point and seemed to point at the symptoms i had. So i grabbed the gasket, whopping $3, lol, whatever, but then i had to also buy a oil pan gasket... that was a different story, $90 for that, damn. but it is what it is so i head to my buddy's garage with the gaskets and oil change supplies, we lifted up the truck to drop the oil pan, started with draining the oil, so i tossed the pan under and pulled the plug, walked away for 10 minutes, came back and the oil was just barely dripping out, but there was only a couple liters in the pan, thought it was odd but moved along, this is a big job, gotta drop the front diff to get the oil pan out, couple hours of working and cussing and the oil pan was free, lowered it down to pull it out and oil splashed on me, not unexpected but it was a lot, once we got the pan down, we saw it was half full of oil still. So at this point we thought maybe there was just excess sludge that had prevented the oil from draining, so we dumped the pan out and started cleaning it up with rags and a scraper, then we saw crystallization in the bottom of the pan, there was ice in there..... ice means water, so somehow condensation had build up to the point where the pickup tube was actually submerged in ice, and therefore unable to suck oil to bring it to the top of the engine. Was the first time me or any of the people helping had ever experienced this, realized afterward the issue could have been resolved with an oil change, and never would have happened in a warmer climate, and there was really no way to know what the issue was without dropping the pan anyway... i am still kinda confused why it didn't happen sooner, it's been -20 for a month straight and it just happened now. But anyway, we changed the o-ring anyway, because, why not? common failure point, got it all apart, it was $3, so whatever. put it all back together with a fresh filter and full synthetic, and it runs like a top now.
So, lesson learned, even if its a very low usage vehicle, the date for oil changes does matter, i still think 3 months is bullshit, but maybe 6 months at least.
You can flame me if you want for improper maintenance, it's all good, if this helps anybody it's worth it.