Dennis Judd's Blog

Oil Change

So yesterday I changed the oil in my car.

This is important for two reasons:
1. This was the first time I've ever changed the oil in anything in my life
2. It was on a Honda Insight

I would like to thank the support of friends and other insight owners who encouraged me to change the oil, and gave me tips on it. But most of the reason for my decision to do this was brought about by Schaumburg Honda and their ridiculous increase of pricing due to the Honda Insight being considered a special vehicle. There is no way in hell I'd pay somebody 40 dollars to change the oil in my car just because it takes an extra 5 minutes for some high school drop out to take off 5 bolts to reach the oil pan. (normal oil change 29, plus special 11 dollar handling fee for Insights)

This brings me to another facet of the oil change experience that only further served to convince me the world is filled with incompentent morons. There were a total of 8 screws and 2 J-clips missing from the undercarriage skirt. 4 course thread screws (2 in each wheel well) and everything else from the main skirt assembly.

Let me show you what I mean, here is a picture of the skirt and where the bolts were missing. If you click on the picture a second time you can get a view larger than 640x480

As you probably can see, I ended up replacing them with 6mm metric flange bolts (and some 1/4" fender washers) that I was able to get from the local hardware store. I also already had some screws for the wheel well lying around. But it's not my point. Also, I ended up cutting off the corners of the plastic shroud so that I could use those screws for future removal. Much easier than trying to get those 4 across the aluminum bar...those bastards just spin...

There has only been one place this car has been serviced....Schaumburg Honda. That means somebody there left these off on purpose/ignorance, and that is completely unacceptable. Lord only know's how long I've been driving the car around like this, and the plastic in the wheel wells was warped from the lack of support...probably perminantly.

moving on....the oil change was pretty straight forward, but let's run down the price list as compared to paying for some other confirmed idiot to do this.
- Rhino Ramps $16.93 at Walmart
- 3 quarts Mobil 1 synth 0w-20 oil $4.77 each at Walmart
- Oil Filter ST6607 $2.07 at Walmart
- Creeper $14.97 at Walmart (completly useless...save your money)
- 5 crush washers from Honda $1.33 (you get a discount for buying 5...heh, 15% off)
Tim was nice enough to lend me his torque wrench and oil filter remover (thanks again) and everything went well in my opinion. I'm still checking for leaks but none so far. The torque wrench I used only goes up to 22 ft-lbs, and the factory manual calls for 29 ft-lb, but there's a lot of disagreement about that so I'll just keep my eye on it and if it doesn't leak, then all's well.

Thanks again to Tim and the guys at the Honda Insight Forum at insightcentral.net for their help with figuring out what I'd need. After this initial investment future oil changes should only cost about 18 bucks, and now I can do them whenever is convienent for me...no more sitting around the car dealer with my thumb up my ass for an hour.

Posted by Dennis Judd at November 15, 2004 11:29 AM | TrackBack