Oil change time!

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The other day I realised, to my horror, that it’s over a year since my poor car last had an oil change! Then yesterday I found that one of my headlight bulbs had blown. Cue a trip to the motor accessories shop yesterday afternoon – but then of course the days are so short that by the time I’d found what I needed it was already going dark. So this lunch time was fix the car time – luckily here it is fine, warm and dry. I put my old overalls on and set to work. I’ve recently discovered that you can remove the old oil with a syphon pump, eliminating the need to grovel about underneath the car (with the added aggravation, with my car, of an engine sump cover that can only be removed with special star-shaped ‘torx’ screws). So I inserted the syphon tube, gave the system a few pumps and then left it to do its job while I fitted new light bulbs. The headlight bulb on the right was the broken one, but the recommendation is to change both at the same time. This was a pain because the fittings on both sides are exactly the same, not mirror images of each other as you might expect, so the right side one is reasonably easy to access if you can lean over far enough to see right inside the front of the car, while the left is very difficult and when you’ve managed to wriggle your hand into position, you can no longer see what you’re doing. It isn’t so easy to feel either as I was wearing gloves (You mustn’t touch the light bulbs with bare hands). Still, with the aid of a torch and Little One’s step stool I was able to lean over far enough, fitted the right side bulb and then managed to do the left side one mainly by feel. And yes I did check that now they both work, hurrah! Next thing was to pull off the engine cover, unscrew the cap for the oil filter and replace the seal and filter – that was easier than expected – then fill up with new oil, check it, top up, run the engine for a bit and top up again and it was all done. So now it’s sorted for the winter and although it was a bit of a faff it was much quicker than driving to the garage then walking home, than later walking back again to pick up the car, and of course cheaper, and much more satisfying too! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2015.