My little project - IS200 Turbo
My little project - IS200 Turbo
Here's my next update of "stuff that's happened whilst I've been away from the forum".
A few weeks back, I thought it was about time I had an oil change. That hadn't been done since my turbo conversion, and I'd done several thousand miles since then. Given that nothing else needed servicing, I thought I'd have a crack at doing it myself. Slight inconvenience being that I don't have a driveway, but there is a car park immediately to the rear of my back garden, so I put the car up on some ramps there.
However, a simple oil change turned into a near-disaster.
I thought that the oil filter change would be the tricky bit, and sure enough, it was a pig. I bought a claw-type oil filter removal tool to help out, one of these :
It was still tricky using that, due to the limited access to the oil filter, as those who have tried it will know. I realise I could have just punched a screwdriver through the old filter to get it off, but tightening it up again would still have needed a tool. Anyway, after a lot of swearing, I eventually managed to replace the filter.
Oil was drained fine, no problem.
The seemingly-trivial task of replacing the sump plug was where it all went horribly wrong though. I replaced it, tightened it up (not over-tight, I'm usually loathe to put too much force on anything unless I'm really, really sure about it), and I had a horrible sinking feeling as it felt like it tightened slightly, and then suddenly went loose and just turned forever.
I undid the sump plug again, and sure enough, the worst had happened. The bolt had sheared, leaving most of itself inside the sump. Now that might well sound like an odd problem, and not too tricky to fix (tap out the broken bolt and fit a new plug), but here's the complication. My sump plug had been tapped to hold the oil temperature sensor for my oil temp gauge, when I had the conversion work done. Looking at the remains, it looks like almost all of the sump plug had been removed, leaving it very hollow (and presumably weak ?) indeed. So what was left in my sump now was just a hollow ring of thread, i.e. a big hole and no way for me to seal the sump, hence no way to put any oil in (and therefore leaving the car undriveable).
This is what was left of the sump plug. Most of it was left inside the sump hock: :
Here's the oil temp probe, on its own :
And here you can see just how much of the plug had to be tapped out to house it :
... leaving you with something like this, albeit with a lot more thread originally being present :
So I was left with an undriveable car (no engine oil). I could have perhaps tried to extract the broken thread myself, but I was worried about damaging the sump whilst doing so. I decided it would be best to get someone who knew what they were doing to have a look.
I had to send the car off on a transporter, a very sad sight. Especially with a little trickle of oil following the car as it was winched onto the back of the truck, which looked kind of like its "blood" :crying:
(bad picture from my phone) :
I was in a bit of a panic about who to send the car to, since I needed it fixed ASAP (being my daily driver). I sent it down to Lexus Guildford. They took a look and pronounced that it needed a new sump, but they didn't want to touch it since my sump had been modified to have an oil return feed from the turbo (which I'd forgotten about, I was thinking the sump was at least standard). They seemed scared of doing anything that could go wrong and then me pointing the finger at them.
After a while I suddenly had a brainwave and thought of Wayne (supratruck). I called him up and found he was working at a garage in SW London, so not a million miles from me, and thought he could fix it. So another transporter was booked (more cost !) to collect the car from Lexus and take it up to him.
A few hours work and he got it fixed, yay ! He did so just by removing the remains of the broken thread, no sump replacement (or even removal required). A few litres of fresh oil and I was back on the road again, phew !
Big thanks to Wayne for his great work. I just wish I'd thought of getting the car to him in the first place. Maybe I could have just taken it to a local mechanic, but given the fact the car couldn't be driven, I couldn't easily just take it to various garages to let them have a look, I needed to be sure that whereever I got it taken to, could finish the job.
I don't think I put any excess force on the sump plug. I'm no expert, but I think that drilling it out for the temp sensor just weakened it too much, so it was a problem waiting to happen.
Right now the oil temp sensor is still not connected, so my oil temp sensor isn't working. That's no biggie though, since I know from experience that my oil temperature doesn't go too high at any point. It's just nice to be able to know when the oil has warmed up properly, but again I know roughly how long that takes now.
Wayne suggested that I could attach the oil temp sensor into the area of the VVT-i oil outlet (similar to where SPC Horsham took the oil return line on their turbo conversions). So that's something to think about. The oil filter sandwich plate idea can be tricky due to lack of clearance (I could relocate the oil filter maybe, which would also help when it comes to oil filter change time).
Anyway, a simple oil change turned into a real drama. Luckily it was all fixed relatively easily, and the car is none the worse for its experience (just a new sump plug !).
I'd say oil filter relocation as it sounds like the current location is a pain in the ****, but if you don't want all the extra fittings and hoses that create extra points of failure, you could get a boss welded into your sump specifically for the sensor (which is what I'd do).
bean http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y179/St...G_0468.jpg
Bodge!
bean http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y179/St...G_0468.jpg
Bodge!
I thought that the oil pan was the sump, because it just attaches to the engine block. What extra stuff makes up the sump then ? There's a diagram below showing this on the IS200.
The exhaust isn't the problem, it's the front suspension cross-member, I believe. So you either need to drop that out, or pull the engine upwards.
And it looks like the original sump plug was drilled through using the largest diameter of the sensor then tapped but you could get away with drilling a hole the size of the smaller end of the sensor and making the threaded part (in the head of the sump plug) larger which should not significantly weakening the sump plug threads.