Moto Luvr: August 2020

Replaced oil pan

My beater was starting to drip some fluid in my driveway, I believed it to be oil (another candidate would be P.S. fluid).

Click here for my original post on this car.
Click here for update #1 on this car.
Click here for update #2...

The oil pan was original to the car and was wet with oil, and quite corroded. Of course oil can get blown around from driving, and it can be hard to locate the source of a leak. The plan was to clean oil and grime from the block, replace the pan and gasket, and monitor for anymore fluid to appear. I bought a new pan off of Ebay for $26, it came with a cheap gasket. I also got a tube of Hondabond HT (a hi-temp RTV) for $12. After some consideration, I decided to get a Fel-Pro brand gasket ($25) rather than go with the cheapie I already had.

Old and new oil pan

Exhaust flex-pipe already taken off. Removing the aluminum shield for the flex-plate, transmission side, to get at all the oil pan bolts.

The Honda factory does not use a gasket. They apply a bead of hondabond all the way around and torque to spec. No doubt that is cheaper than installing a gasket. The heads of the bolts on the pan were quite rusted, but I managed to get them all off, then use a pry bar to separate the pan, from the block.

Except: there are 2 studs with nuts used in the center of the pan, front and back. ( no doubt to guide the pan on without sliding it around on wet RTV. this is a photo of the surviving one. The other (the front one) would not budge, and by the end, I had rounded the nut pretty good. So I decided to cut it off, remove the pan, drill it out, clean the threads, and replace with a bolt

Old pan off, you can see the oil pick-up and the flex plate

Ready to drill out this frozen stud, and replace with a bolt.

Only big mishap:

While I was drilling it out, I snapped off my titanium coated drill bit, inside the stud.

This was the face I made....

Now I had to pretend this fastener didn't exist.
I put a bead of Hondabond across the span, where the missing stud was, on both the top, and bottom, of the gasket. I tightened all pan bolts to 100 inch pounds (roughly spec). I also had to modify my tightening sequence, as the busted fastener was #2 out of 18. I then let it cure for 3 days. It seems to be working so far.

A side note: I actually took my angle grinder and removed some material from the inside of the aluminum shield that straddles the pan, because the thickness of the gasket threw off fitment. I tightened the shield bolts to 20 ft. lbs. as the receiving threads of the transmission housing were aluminum, (guessed on this, don't know the factory spec).