Project #10 - New Twist on an Oil Change

Oil changes on a Samurai are about as straightforward as an oil change can get.  Everything's easy to access and it's usually, "WHAM, BAM, THANK YOU, MAN!"  Somehow, I managed to really complicate an oil change this weekend.  Instead of spending perhaps an hour on the whole thing, I spent more hours than I care to think about.  Why?

Well, for starters on Saturday I began researching oil filters and that ate up gobs of time.  Then, I spent way too much time roaming around looking at filters and it just spiraled out of control.  Sunday, I went way out to K-Mart in Ammon to buy some $5/quart Castrol Syn Blend oil for a mere $3/quart.  Throw in a trip to a thrift store to buy a low profile cake container and you're looking at even more gobs of time.  The upshot of all this running in circles is that I feel like I have the best possible oil filter available at any price and that I am using the best possible oil for the money.  Likewise, I came up with a "new twist" on the time-honored "guy thing" of doing oil changes.


But the biggest deal of the oil change is the plastic container shown in the photo.  It's amazing I never thought of this in all the previous years of doing Zuki oil changes!  What a dummy.  You simply slide this plastic container atop two of the front suspension and steering supports below the oil filter.  You pop off the oil filter and 100% of ALL that sloppy oil goes into the handy, dandy little container situated in perfect position below the filter.  No mess and nary a drop of stray oil to clean up.  ALL of the oil from the filter is captured for recycling and NONE of it goes onto the groundsheet or, (GADS!) into the soil.  This is mighty slick.  It makes an oil change downright civilized.

OK, what about the Purolater Pure One filter?  Bosch now owns Purolater so the filters shown below are the exact same as a Bosch.  I found documentation online to convince me that the innards of this filter as as good or better than the most expensive oil filters available for the Zuki such as K&N and AMSOil.  In fact, I came upon documentation that the Pure One filter actually outperforms the much-hyped AMSOil filter by a couple of percentage points. You can buy the Pure One all day long for seven dollars and change.  The K&N filter is generally around $15 and the AMSOil filter is $17 and up.

Note: The filter on the left is the stock item.  I thought I could use the one on the right but the post diameter was wrong.  One of these days, I will find a correct oversized filter for the Zuki.

One of these days soon, I will put up a separate page on oil filters and oil and so forth.  In the meantime, I highly recommend adopting these two new twists described above.  It was worth the time and trouble to find and use these techniques.