The Broken Fiat Club

Completed the swap but still have the low oil pressure issue

The coolant vanished too, but I need to check if it's in the oil.

Taking off the oil pan is not as bad as I thought, so if the coolant is not escaping into the oil that will be the next step.

So good news is that I put more coolant in and this time it stayed put, also the oil level didn't go up by a quart. So looks like I've solved one issue, but unfortunately it is still complaining about the low oil pressure at idle.

Current plan is to put the manual oil pressure gauge back on (after the car is nice and cool again), and then see what that is showing. That will determine if I have a signal error from the sender or if there is a mechanical issue within the block.

Pressure at warm idle is very low. Oil pressure gauge doesn’t want to move at all. Pressure looks good at 3000rpm (50psi).

So starting the process to strip the car down again to get the oil pan off.

Just to prove we’re learning, used two buckets to drain the radiator….

I wish I had some magic knowledge to fix this.

Got the oil pan off, this weekend. The alldatadiy instructions said to remove the torque mount bracket pretty early on, which I would do almost last in hindsight to stop the engine moving around. Had to remove the maniverter, passenger side wheel liner, torque mount. There are a couple of bolts on the flywheel cover but I’d missed those during the install so that was convenient.

The oil pan itself was pretty easy. A bunch of 10mm bolts, a couple of which are hidden behind the plastic protective plate on the oil pan (so need to remove that too). The studs on the passenger side are a pain to remove (or at least for me). The factory didn’t leave much thread to play with and the nuts have a flange so that doesn’t leave much tool room (some nuts without a flange would make it a bit easier). Once all the fasteners are off just use a screwdriver at one of the pry points to get a start and then slide in a pry tool to work it off.

Nothing overly surprising in the pan. There is a little sludgy stuff that you can see on the bolts in the picture. There was some oil in the pickup which dropped on my chest as soon as the 2 bolts were loosened. Hopefully the new sender and gasket will arrive this week and I can button the car up next weekend.

With my wife still in the hospital, and the weather being unpleasantly hot, progress remains pretty slow.

Most of today was spent cleaning up the oil pan. There was a layer of black sediment at the bottom of the pan. Not sure if that is pretty normal for 50K or if the previous owner stretched the oil changes out a bit far. In any case I gave it a good clean. Installed the new pickup, replacing the gasket. The old gasket didn't look too bad but I remain hopeful. The next step would be the oil pump I suppose, but that seems unlikely to be bad. I am considering shoving some compressed air up to see if I can dislodge any sediment that might be in it.

As a renewed sign of confidence I decided to pain the oil pan to match the valve cover.

I noticed that the bolts from the oil pan had RTV in the threads. I thought at first there were little o-rings. Don’t know if it makes any difference but I spent time today giving the bolts a good scrub, and then painted them just because. One of the studs has some damage to the threads that is making the nut go on at an odd angle. Will try to pull one out of the other block to replace it.

Pan is back!

Getting the pan, with the dust shield on, lined up was proving difficult. Then the hospital called in the middle of the effort so we stopped and reset.

The back side of the dust shield didn't want to slide in to place. So we installed the dust shield first, without the pan,. It's missing the bottom 10mm bolt now but it went in much easier.

I have 55,000 miles on my Sport now. I just had the oil pan off about a month ago and it was very clean inside. I've used Mobil 1 since it was new. Those little studs on the passenger side of the oil pan should have about a 4mm hex head on them to use to remove and reinstall them.

That’s probably much easier than the double nut method, which seems to be hard on the threads. Got it done, but I’ll remember that for next time.