Before I get to the next bit I noticed last night while I was underneath pulling the drain bolt to change my oil, there was a TON of crusty but still greasy oil slung all over the bottom of the oil pan, the bottom of the front diff, and a bit on the trans bell housing. Like ALOT….. it had been dripping very slowly/intermittently the last couple months with maybe a few small drops every few days or so, with no far sling spatter all over the bottom end. I had just been keeping an eye on it….. but then this buildup caught me off guard.
I won’t lie the bike ride this morning wore me out super quick after not getting really any biking in the last two summers. While trying to figure out getting back into town for autozone since I was too tired to ride, and calling to make sure they still had the correct T fitting for me to come grab, I inspected the passenger side valve cover and found an interesting scenario. The gasket was totally fine. Got it opened up to find the gasket not torn or flattened out like a pancake. I then realize the oil filler tube that’s attached at the forward end of the cover over the #2 cylinder wasn’t sitting flush in its mount. It’s always had a small twist in it, I notice the twist if I don’t unscrew the fill cap at the right angle but never gave it much thought. Once I saw the tube not sitting flush and realized there’s a gasket in it, I immediately figured out I should probably try and replace it and that’s possibly the source of the crusty buildup I noticed at the valve cover and probably a big contributor to the underside situation.
I couldn’t find a GM part number or exploded parts view to figure out which one was correct so I called over the shop that’s across the street from autozone that I’ve been doing a ton of business with the last two summers since the other shop I detailed for for years closed up. Tech looked up my valve covers in his system and confirmed that the filler tube gasket is separately serviceable and that dorman makes a replacement.
Called up my friend Lisa and asked if I could borrow her little Suzuki samurai that she keeps as the snow beater to run into town. She’s like yep come on over I so I rode my bike to her house just a couple minutes away from my house and hopped in the samurai. We call it the roller skate. It’s definitely an experience to drive cuz she’s a bit old and rickety, bucket of bolts style… but I really like it and I like getting into a manual as often as I can to be able to keep those skills fresh haha. Parts store had the correct T fitting, and I grabbed a set of the “quick disconnect tool” that’s supposed to make getting the old fittings off easy and got back to the house. I also looked for the filler tube gasket, but autozone for some reason had the part listed in their catalog but was un-orderable, which kinda sucked. I realize the ideal solution in this scenario is to get metal replacements from gruven parts to avoid this exact failure in the connector happening again at some point. But unfortunately those will take a fair bit of time to get ordered and shipped to me and I need the Denali back on the road. Lost a day of work today so plastic dorman connector fitting it is for the time being. Was able to have the NAPA parts store across town get the tube fitting gasket ordered for me and it should be up the mountain from the warehouse first thing tomorrow morning.
I thought I’d learned this lesson already but apparently not.
