At a young age, I learned about checking the oil in my car from my mother. Now I have also learned to change my own oil.
As part of my learning journey, I asked my husband to teach me how to change the oil in my truck.
I feel a real sense of accomplishment. One surprising result was ending up with sore abdominals from going back and forth under the truck.
The first part of the process was checking that there was not any kind of issue with putting new oil in the truck. We took out the dipstick and removed the oil fill cap.
Next was getting under the truck and removing the oil filter. I am not used to getting on a dirty garage floor, so it was a bit unsettling for me. It certainly wasn’t the most comfortable thing.
I had to make sure the oil pan was in the right place to catch the oil. I removed the filter and set it down in the oil pan to let the oil drip out. I took the new filter and placed it on top of the old one to provide some lubrication.
I was having a heck of a time putting the new filter on, but I really wanted to do it. Eventually, I did have to have my husband do it, but it turned out that he was not able to do it either.
We figured out that we had actually bought the wrong size filter. We had to put the old one back on and moved on to the next part of the oil change.
The next part was removing the drain plug on the oil pan and letting it completely drain. This required the use of a wrench and a bit of muscle. Then it was time to put in the new oil.
I had to make sure to go slow and make sure nothing overflowed. It was necessary to start the engine for about 20 seconds so that oil would fill the filter. Once that was complete, I checked the oil to make sure everything was at the proper level.
The old oil gets put back into the bottle that the new oil came in and eventually gets taken to somewhere like Autozone or O’ Reilly for recycling. The hardest part about the whole thing was putting on the oil filter, but other than that it really wasn’t that difficult of a thing. I love that I was able to learn something new.
I am not sure what’s next in my learning journey. My husband says that we are getting close to needing to do a full tune up on my truck. He does all the maintenance on all our vehicles and I am so thankful for that.
Maybe I will have to take a more hands on approach when we do the tune up. I do like knowing how everything runs under the hood and I am glad that my husband can teach me these things.
Photos property of Faithful Homesteader.
