Managed to get a couple of small but important jobs out of the way on the weekend.
I had suspected that the thermostat needed replacing back in the summer.
However, after taking it for a good 20 mile run the other day in the cold weather, the temperature gauge barely moved out of the blue.
One of the best things about clearing out my garage has been that I can now effectively hide from the rain.
At least for some jobs anyway.
Just for anyone who doesn't know, if you want to change the stat, take the coolant return hose off the header tank and lower it down to ground level.
This will effectively siphon the coolant from the system with the least amount of mess.
It doesn't get all the coolant out of the system, but it gets enough out so that you don't end up with coolant over the floor when you take the thermostat off:
Praise the gods! All 3 bolts came out without breaking, makes a change:
Obviously the person who put them in last time remembered to grease them up properly.
Here you can also see the gap which coolant can get through rendering the stat useless:
New stat on. This is the Wahler part I temporarily fitted to the LS a couple of months back.
This will be replaced again with a genuine part when it arrives.
Yeah I know, I'm a total genuine parts nazi, I can't help it.
Topped the system up with coolant, this has been watered down before hand 50/50 by the way.
I'd say a good two thirds was drained out:
Mmmm, genuine...
Next job was to change the gearbox oil.
For this, the car was switched to the other side, just to confuse you:
Despite being changed only 8,000 miles ago (well supposedly anyway, I didn't do it myself) it was looking quite dark and had lost it's red colour. It also wasn't smelling too good:
After a bit of a faff going down the road and back (twice) to get the right spanner (this is a 24mm bolt by the way [absolutely no where on the internet or in the Haynes manual does it tell you this by the way]), the old oil was drained:
Far more oil came out than I thought, about 6 pints (or 3.5 litres for all you Frenchies):
It was surprisingly difficult to fill the system up again as Vauxhall in their wisdom failed to put a fill point on the gearbox, meaning you have to fill the system up from the dipstick tube. This means that the tube gets coated with oil on the inside:
This has the unfortunate consequence of giving you a totally inaccurate reading when you check the oil level with the dipstick. This is because it gets covered in oil as it gets inserted into the tube.
Now, sensible folk among you may say simply measure the amount of oil you removed and put the same amount back in.
Yes, good point.
I however wanted to drain out as much of the old oil as possible. I achieved this by putting a small amount of fresh oil into the system and then draining that out too. This meant I had more oil in the drain pan than was initially drained. Oh well, I'll remember next time.
Anyway, almost 4 bottles of Dexron VI later, it was full of oil once more, huzza!!
It wasn't quite as clean looking as I thought, considering I just put it in.
This is after running the engine for a few minutes and selecting each gear to allow the oil to flow into all areas of the gearbox properly:
One thing that is slightly disconcerting are these metal fragments left at the bottom of the drain pan.
Pretty sure that's not supposed to happen.
Oh well, it'll be fine... probably.
On with the obligatory photos!
Fun with puddles!