What Did You Do To Your Car Today?

[Bridgecity]

Junior and I did an oil change and plugs on the Mazda 3 a couple nights ago.  Plugs were overdue according to maintenance schedule.  Oil changes are a breeze; no oil dripping on any components when pulling the plug or filter and nothing needs to be removed for access.  Plugs came out without issue.  All done within an hour.

Two of the plugs had oil on them.  Nothing major sitting in the plug holes, but the valve cover gasket obviously is leaking at the two plug openings.  We'll have to swap that out at some point. 

We'll also be doing to tranny oil at some point soon.  I'll likely drop the pan, change the screen, and clean the pan out.  I have the screen and pan gasket at home.  Mazda doesn't have a schedule for the tranny fluid, but I'm going to do it regardless.  I do have some angst pulling those tiny pan bolts with a car that has 170k and has lived in SK, but its not all that rusty under there.  Should be OK.

It was my first time under the car, and everything looks as it should.  No leaks, CVs look good, etc.

[RRocket]

Junior and I did an oil change and plugs on the Mazda 3 a couple nights ago.  Plugs were overdue according to maintenance schedule.  Oil changes are a breeze; no oil dripping on any components when pulling the plug or filter and nothing needs to be removed for access.  Plugs came out without issue.  All done within an hour.

Two of the plugs had oil on them.  Nothing major sitting in the plug holes, but the valve cover gasket obviously is leaking at the two plug openings.  We'll have to swap that out at some point. 

We'll also be doing to tranny oil at some point soon.  I'll likely drop the pan, change the screen, and clean the pan out.  I have the screen and pan gasket at home.  Mazda doesn't have a schedule for the tranny fluid, but I'm going to do it regardless.  I do have some angst pulling those tiny pan bolts with a car that has 170k and has lived in SK, but its not all that rusty under there.  Should be OK.

It was my first time under the car, and everything looks as it should.  No leaks, CVs look good, etc.

Nice work!

[Firm]

Yep, well done. Gotta love a simple 4 cylinder for ease of maintenance.

I've been dealing with an odd issue on the Green Firebird. It's done this as long as I've had it, so it's not new, but I've been using the car pretty regular and would like to address it....Maybe 50% of the time you'll go to crank it up and the starter will just click (one loud click), flick the key back and fourth 2-3 times and it'll fire up. The starter always sounds kinda labored when it does go too...

Previously I've load tested the battery and actually swapped in a new starter, no change. I thought maybe the battery cables were corroded inside increasing resistance, so today I swapped new cables in, which is kind of an annoying job due to the tight clearances in the LT1 engine bay, and cleaned all the main grounds. Still does the same thing 

I am kinda outta ideas so the only thing I can think of is that when this engine was 'built' by a previous owner they upped the compression...It clearly has a cam in it, but I don't know what else has been done. If it is higher compression, then it might need a higher torque starter to crank it over properly. That, or there's something going on with the timing map for the 'start' sequence. A problem for another time I guess, lol.