I always like to start the season with some fresh oil. I've been running Driven DT-50 on Scarlett for some time now but decided to give GP-1 a try next. Unlike DT-50 which is a pure synthetic, GP-1 is synthetic blended with Pennsylvania Grade base dinosaur oil given it a green color. It's supposed to be quite good for classic air cooled cars and includes a high amount of ZDDP.
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| Driven GP-1 |
I really love using my Raceramp wheel cribs for this stuff. With the oil lines running through the passenger side of this car, it's a bit hard to place the pucks exactly right if I try to lift it using the QuickJack. With this setup, I can get it off the ground high enough and just let it rest on the wheels.
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| Draining the oil |
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| Draining the oil |
I let it drain overnight to make sure I got out as much oil as possible. Since I was changing oil types, I wanted to make sure even the oil in the oil cooler and oil cooler lines came out. Normally this would be pretty hard to do but the Elephant Racing finned cooling lines make this an easy job. There's a Schrader valve right after the oil cooler thermostat you can use to inject up to 90psi of air to push the oil through the system for a more thorough purge. That's around 1-2 quarts of extra oil that come out if you do this right.
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| Schrader valve to push the old oil out |
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| Using compressed air with about 85psi of pressure |
Torqued the drain bolts to 31 ft-lb and popped in a fresh Mahle OC-54 oil filter and added 9 quarts to start off with. That pretty much fills that the oil tank and most of the engine but the oil cooler is still empty at this point. Drove the car around for about 10 minutes to get everything up to temp so that the oil cooler valve would open up, then kept checking the oil level while the engine was hot and idling. I had to add a full 3 more quarts. This is a good thing as a completely dry engine and system should be around 12 quarts to fill up so my drain method did in fact get out almost all the oil from the system leaving the dipstick right at around the 3/4 mark.
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| Fresh Mahle OC-54 oil filter. |
Engine's humming along nicely and running very smoothly. Ready to hit the streets near you soon.
Maintenance Update:
Mileage: 169,734
- 12 quarts Driven GP-1 20W-50
- Mahle OC54 oil filter
