Even if you're not a great mechanic, there's a sense of accomplishment that goes along with crawling out from under your car, scrubbing your hands with Go-Jo and knowing that you just successfully did a job like changing your own oil. At the same time, though, there can be a down side to DIY oil changes...
- You can cross-thread the drain plug, necessitating a tap-and-die job to cut new threads. On an aluminum oil pan, you may end up having to replace the entire pan.
- You can leave off the copper crush washer when reinstalling the drain plug, resulting in a slow leak
- The oil filter should be barely tighter than hand-tight...overtightening it can deform the rubber gasket, causing a leak. Not tightening it enough can cause it to loosen up completely and dump all the oil out of the crankcase!
- It's easy to overlook undercarriage problems such as worn or damaged suspension parts, rust, damaged or rusty exhaust hangers or other parts
- At the end of the job, you're left with five quarts of smelly, disgusting used motor oil. That may not sound like much, but after the next time you change oil, you're going to have two and a half gallons of the stuff...and it's invariably going to end up in places other than your drain pan before you can take it to recycling
- You're crawling around under a 3000-pound vehicle, which means it has to be raised on ramps or jackstands, and there's always an element of danger there
The kicker is, considering the price of oil changes, you're not even saving yourself that much time and money by taking the DIY approach.
Still not convinced? Consider this as well...it's recommended that your tires should be rotated about every 5-6,000 miles. When you purchase a set of tires at 106 St Tire & Wheel in Queens, NY, they come with free rotations for the life of the tire. We have yet to meet anyone who enjoys rotating his own tires – it means putting all four corners of the car off the ground, taking off all four tires, changing their positions according to manufacturer's recommendations, mounting them again and replacing the wheel covers.
At 106 St Tire & Wheel in Queens, NY, we can easily perform a tire rotation at the same time as your oil change...after all, the intervals for the two are the same. The car's already up in the air on a lift rack, our techs have air tools and we can do a tire rotation in a fraction of the time it would take in your driveway. How's that for sweetening the deal a bit?
Stop messing around with the ramps, the drain pan and the socket wrench. Your time's worth more than that. Bring your vehicle on down to 106 St Tire & Wheel in Queens, NY and let us take care of it! Schedule an appointment, today!