These Are The Worst Car Maintenance Tasks You’ve Ever Attempted

“I replaced the oil pump pickup seal (which bridges the engine-mounted oil pump and the oil-pan-mounted pickup) in our ‘14 Cruze Diesel a couple of summers ago and that was a lot of work. It isn’t typically considered “maintenance”, but over time it hardens up, becomes brittle, and can crack and suck in air instead of oil on a cold start which is obviously bad.

“We don’t have any for-sure US failures on the Cruze forum, but this engine is used in Europe where these have failed, enough so to where custom ones exist that are made of aluminum with a pair of Viton seals that will never have the failure mode of the OE one that has a “skirt” that squishes to form the seal (and is what hardens).

“Anyway, it seems pretty straightforward: drop the pan and replace it, but not quite…

“Dropping the pan requires dropping the front half of the exhaust (I removed it to get it out of my way), removing the passenger CV shaft (which requires pulling the knuckle off the ball joint which was a nightmare to break free) in order to also remove the intermediate shaft because it is bolted to the oil pan. Then you can remove the oil pan (obviously you had to have drained the oil and the trans fluid prior to all of this) – which had no interest in releasing, even after beating it with a hammer for a day (it eventually dropped when I left the bolts loose). Oh, and the PCV breather that attaches to the oil pan? Yeah, that has a ‘tamper-proof’ bolt which requires drilling a slot in it to remove… or hammering a socket onto it to get it out.

“Now that you’ve got the oil pan out, pull the seal and install the new one. Super easy! Clean off the RTV off the pan and apply new stuff and… oh, wait, loading the pan is borderline impossible to do without wiping half the RTV off because the back of the pan has two bolts in the bellhousing, and the shield between the trans and engine has cutouts the same size as the flange of the oil pan – so you cannot load it upwards at all (I suspect this is where one of my oil leaks now is).

“Oh, and nevermind the fact that the aftermarket seal now makes aligning it to the opening in the pickup quite a lot of work (though it eventually seats as you tighten the bolts – something that took me multiple dry-fits to find out). Once you finally have the oil pan reinstalled, reassembly is pretty simple (putting all that shit you took off back on) and then fill it with oil. Then you get to put in roughly how much trans fluid you took out and go through the bizarre fluid level check of that Aisin AF40/6 transmission and you’re finally done! So easy!”