So last week after battling the oil cooler lines and deciding I was done messing with it, I made the appointment for last Friday to drop it to the mechanic next door to my gym. Good guy and is reasonably fair with labor prices and he’ll put into the first available opening he has when I need something done so that’s always a plus. He was also cool with me being the new cooler liens that I’d already bought and using them. So Friday morning I start up the Denali, pull it out of the garage and head back inside to get my coffee mixed up and grab what I needed to hit the gym while the truck was warming up. I come back out ready to elwve not even ten minutes later and THANK GOD I made it out when I did…….. I see the truck DUMPING OIL out all over the ground……. CRAP CRAP CRAP…… it was tapping slightly but not running horrendously so I immediately shut it down and pop the hood.
Another one of GM’s wonderful design ideas to use cheap plastic parts to connect lines that have HOT engine fluids running through them…… ooi…. The little plastic donut that connects the cooler line to the radiator fitting had broken and the line popped off which allowed it to dump oil.
Such an odd occurrence because the evening before, I had to rearrange stuff in the garage and swap the truck and the samurai position in the garage so the truck would be ready to go and I ended up letting the truck idle for closer to 15 minutes simply because it hadn’t ram much the few days prior. And it was totally fine. Moved the vehicles around, moved a few things while I let the truck run in the street and while it didn’t get all the way up to running temp it was close but no problems. Then the next morning BAM oil everywhere… all brand new oil dumped on the street….
Thankfully we have AAA for roadside assistance and whatever the highest number of miles of towing so I called and they put in a tow request. Called the mechanic to let him know and he said “no worries we’ll get it sorted when you get here.” Thankfully the tow request put me at an hour wait for a tow and less than 10 minutes after getting off the phone with dispatch the driver called said he was jsut a few minutes away. I informed the AA dispatch of the necessity for a rollback deck truck since it couldn’t be towed on its wheels with AWD and the driver was impressed that I knew that was necessary lol. Had me towed in a few minutes.
Mechanic said I lucked out and that there was still a quart of oil in the engine when he got into it and that probably saved me from any internal engine damage….. Crisis averted and the cooler line got swapped. But dang that was a scare I really could have done without… lol the remnants of the oil dump still need to get cleaned up but my paycheck from the resort barely covered rent….. ugh…. I’m tired of this slow season about even being able to just do simple things like pick up litter form the store to clean up the mess…..
anyways, let the Denali sit in the garage over the weekend and save fuel so I used the samurai. Been drying it the last couple days and it’s running fine and holding oil pressure fine, but it’s still letting out a little oil burn smoke from under the hood which it was doing a bit of off and on before the cooler line swap. So I still need to figure out why that is. I’m sure I haven’t gotten all the oil cleaned out of the engine bay so I gotta give it another pressure wash and hit everything with some ZEP purple cleaner in the foam cannon to get cleaner done into all the crevices of the engine. No dull moments I guess….. I’m just thankful i didn’t grenade my engine.
