Knowing that it wont fix itself and will only get worse I looked a lot closer.
I have changed the oil on my truck myself all but maybe six or seven times. I’ve seen the oil cooler adapter (item 7) where the spin-on filter normally mounts but never really thought much about it. Now I’m looking at it as being the obvious source of my oil leak but not really understanding why its even there. My truck doesn’t have any of the cooler lines, it never has, so why does it have this adapter that serves no other obvious purpose.
Saturday I made a couple calls to some parts stores hoping to get whatever gaskets or o-rings there were to fix the leak, no one I spoke with knew what I was talking about. So I drove into Tucson and went to five different parts stores. Even the old standby NAPA didn’t have the o-ring kit to fix the leak. I stopped off at a self serve car wash and washed down the underside of the truck to determine if that was in fact what was leaking and if there were any other leaks. Once I got home there was oil on the adapter and with the truck needing an oil change I took it off to see if I could determine what was wrong or even fix it. There was one paper gasket (item 5), and an o-ring (item 6). The o-ring was as hard as a rock and cracked, being the obvious problem. I made a new gasket and covered the o-ring with RTV. This of course changed the leak from a random drip to a constant stream.
After cleaning up my mess I logged into rockauto.com and found a Felpro number for a rebuild kit for 2.69. Armed with the part number it was much easier to find the kit locally. The following day after work I was able to pick it up from a small NAPA that was closed Sunday and had the leak fixed in 15 minutes.
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