2009 Nissan Altima Coupe L4 2.5L Lower Engine Oil Pan TRQ OPA07989

Hey, friends. It's Len down at 1A Auto. Today, we're working on a 2010 Nissan Altima. We're going to be removing the oil pan. It's going to be a very simple job. I want to be the guy who shows you how to do it. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

Here we go. First couple of steps before we get started underneath, we're going to come up top. We're going to remove the oil cap. This is going to help remind us to make sure we fill it up with oil. We'll set that where we can find it. We're going to grab the oil dipstick, that's this right here. Pull it out, clean it off. Make sure we don't drip anything on the ground, contaminate our ground. We'll set that aside. Now, we can go ahead and set up the vehicle, lift it up in the air, or just climb under there, however you're doing it, and we'll move on to the next step.

Now, we're underneath the vehicle. I'm standing, you might be laying down, good luck to you. I've got my 14 mm wrench. I'm going to remove this drain plug right here. I'm wearing my safety glasses and I'm wearing hand protection. It's very important, and I have my catch bucket underneath. I'm going to take my 14 mm and I'm going to try to turn this drain plug counterclockwise. There we are, break it free. We want to make sure that this is going to go right into that drain catch bucket. Everything is very rotted under here, probably the reason why we're all replacing these at this time. There we are.

We've got this draining into the catch bucket. Now, we can gauge what we're going to be doing next. We're going to have to start removing these bolts right here. They're 10 mm heads. As you can tell, everything is very rotted and flaking, so what we're going to do is we're going to spray them all down with a little bit of penetrant, going around all of them. We're going to let it sit while this finishes draining, and then we'll move along. Just give it a little bit. I'm going to do them all just like this.

We got our drain plug. Just clean it off a little bit. We're going to be replacing all of this anyway, so really it doesn't have to be too clean. I'm just going to put it back in. I'm going to turn to the right, which is clockwise. I'm wearing my safety glasses, of course, because there's lots of stuff falling down. I'm going to snug it up. Just like that so it doesn't drip down onto the ground or me. There we are. Now, we're going to move ahead. We sprayed all these down already, so we're just going to take a little 10 mm socket with an extension, try to tap it on. Break away all this stuff. We're going to go around, do the same to all of them, then we can start breaking them free.

I just have a 1/4" setup right here. You can use whatever you want, whatever you have access to. It's very important to have your safety glasses on. If you don't have any on, you're taking the risk. Here we are, so that's on there. Just going to wiggle it, get it back off. Now, it looks like it should be all right to come off now. Grab this guy over here. Here we go. I'm using my 1/4" ratchet setup with the 10 mm. I'm turning to the left, which is counterclockwise. Get this puppy out. I'll show you what it looks like. See if I can get it out of the socket. I can't yet. That's pretty much what it looks like. It looks like it's in fairly good condition, aside from just the head being a little rotted, but it still held in there good, so I wouldn't say we have to replace this.

We're going to do all the way around. We're going to get them almost all the way out. We'll leave maybe one a little bit in over here and one a little bit in over there while we're taking out all the rest, that way the pan can't actually physically fall down and maybe hurt us or anything like that. When we drain the oil, we got the majority of the oil out. There's still going to be some oil in there, so when you take the pan down, you need to be very careful not to tip it too much because there might still be oil that could go in your face. You want to make sure you have your drain receptacle ready so we can catch everything we can.

The last one that I was going to be removing. We'll leave that in a few threads, and you'll notice I left one in a few threads over here. That's just so... What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to try to break this pan free from the engine. I can use something like rubber mallet or I can try to use a pry bar and try to break it free, whatever you have to do to get the pan to break free. The reason why I left the two bolts in, though, is so when I do break it free, it doesn't just come falling down and hit the ground or hit my face or hurt me in any way or hurt the environment. I just want those bolts to be just loose enough that I can take them out once I get the pan loose. I don't have to try to use too much force, and it won't let the pan fall off.

Rubber mallet if you wanted to. Bonk, bonk, bonk. You can just hit, hit, hit, whatever you want to try to do. Basically, we're just seeing if we can break it free. If it doesn't want to break free like that, because this our TB in between the engine and the pan, we can try to pry. That might help, so we use something like a pry bar or if you have a screwdriver, whatever you have access to. There we go. We're not reusing this pan, so if it bends a little bit, well, the recycling guy can deal with it if he cares about that. There we are, just going to come around. I'm just finding things that I can pry on, things that aren't breakable. Obviously, you don't want to pry against any sensors that you might find. Try to twist. There we are. Okay, so we got that kind of broken free now.

Now, what we can do is we can go ahead and remove these bolts a little further and/or take them out. I'm going to remove one of them completely, leaving the other one in. I just want to see if I can get this down. Sometimes it's hard to find something safe to pry against, so I'll just come back around. It does seem like a really good spot originally, so I'm going to continue working with it. There's some oil coming out. We got our oil bucket under there, so we're doing all right. That bolt saved us from letting this drop and hurting us. Nice, thank you, bolt. Going to hold the pan, wiggle it, pull it down. There we are. Right into our oil bucket, perfect. We'll leave that here to drain. Now, we can assess our situation up here.

We've got this off. We got it dripping, so make sure you watch your eyes while you're looking up, but this is your oil intake screen. This is where the oil gets sucked up from inside your oil pan up into the engine so it can lubricate everything as it should, then it just comes back down. Anyways, you want to make sure that there isn't anything in there. Maybe you got a little bit of this rubber from the RTV that might have been floating around from the original installation or whatever, could get caught in there. If there is, just see if you can get it out. Just do the best you can. I'm just going to wipe it down. Try to get rid of as many of these drips as I can. Am I ever going to get them all? Well, probably not. I don't have a year to let this thing drip dry.

I've got my little razor blade. I want to be very careful. This is the dangerous end. I'm just going to take it and go right along the engine, just like this. You can see it all peeling up. See, this all needs to come off, okay, everybody? You need to get it as nice and clean and sparkly and beautiful. Make your loved ones proud. Take a picture when you're done, too. Hang it on your wall. Remember that time. Anyway, we'll just keep going. We're going to go right around the line. If you miss a little bit the first time around, that's okay. I don't mind if you go around again.

Right here, there's a little bit like a corrosiony area. As I'm trying to scrape, I'm noticing that the razor blade is kind of jumping around, so we want to make sure that we get that as smooth as possible. The odds that you're going to get it all off is pretty nil, but we just want to do the best we can and that's why we're here, right? We got the oil pan off, we made it this far. We're going to be using some gasket maker or RTV, so odds are it will fill in any pitting that you might have there. Don't get too worried if you have a little bit of pitting. It's not going to be the end of the world. Theoretically, you shouldn't have an oil leak as long as you use the RTV that I'm going to show you how to use.

I'm just going to go around this whole engine, basically. You'll notice that all up along here, there's some crud. If you want to try to get the majority of that off, too, that might be nice, only because when we're trying to put our new pan up with all our nice new gasket material that we put on, we start bumping things and moving stuff around. If we bump some of this crud off, that might fall into our oil pan, so we don't want that. If you can clean it down, you could do that. Use your rag. Make sure you're wearing your safety glasses, please. Hand protection is always key.

This is looking better. If you wanted to really gauge what we're looking at at this point, you could take a little bit of parts cleaner and put it directly on a rag. You don't need to spray up inside your engine and then try to clean it all off. Don't worry about that. Parts cleaner, generally speaking, is like an aerosol base or compressed air base, so there's going to be fluid getting forced out with some sort of compression inside the can. You need to make sure whatever you're squirting at isn't going to deflect everything back towards your face, okay? Make sure your eyes are protected. This is key. Keep your mouth closed when you're doing it. You don't want it in your mouth. There we are. I didn't get any on my beard, don't worry. I know you guys were worried about that.

I'm going around, cleaning it off. This is just preliminary. I'm going to go back around and I'm going to do it again, but this is what we're looking at. It's messy, it's dirty, it's gross. Now, we want to make sure we have all the oiliness off of this. If you got oil like this and you get it on here, it's all kind of oily now, when we put on our RTV for our gasket, it's not going to be able to stick to that, okay, everybody? Make sure that you don't have any oil where the gasket is going to ride.

If there's oil still dripping down and it's making a mess, well, you're either going to have to clean it down or you're going to have to wait. We'll just get the majority of it off. Here we are. Looks pretty good, so now we can grab our RTV. We're going to apply it directly to the oil pan. That's only going to give us a few minutes before it's going to want to dry and start to get tacky, so we need to make sure we have all of our bolts ready. We need to make sure we have our torque specifications ready and our torque wrench.

All right, everybody, so here we have a quick product comparison for you. We have our old pan, as you can tell. It's nice and shiny and new. This came out of a 2010 Nissan Altima. We just took it out, so... well, it's a little dirty, we'll say, "Whatever". Here's our brand new quality 1A Auto part right here. Everything matches up. I can put it right over it and it'll fit right over. All the bolt holes match up perfectly. The only difference is is that this one is all nasty and dirty and rotted out like crazy. This one right here is a quality part. One of the best things about this part is it comes with a brand new drain plug with a gasket, so now you don't have to go out and purchase one, right? Comes right with it. If you need this or any other quality part, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

All right, everyone. Now, it's time to gasket this up. I had a little bit of oil on my gloves. I touched the pan, I was carrying it around, so I want to make sure that I clean off all that as good as I can. Just use a nice clean rag or as clean as you got. Clean along the edges where you're going to be putting all this RTV, the gasket maker. That looks decent. I'm going to take something like this. You have to make sure that you have something that's good for heat because your engine is going to get hot, right?

We're just going to put a bead. I'm going to start around here. I'm just going to go along. It's all right if it's squiggly and jiggly. I'm not a surgeon. If there's any spots you miss, just go back over them. This stuff doesn't cost too much. If it gets too thin, like right there, just go back over it, do it again. It's okay. It's going to be pressed right up against the engine, so nobody is going to see it.

I'm going to look at it. I got some thick spots, I got some thin spots. I got some really thin spots. I'm just going to take this and do it again. Maybe I'll go around this way. Looks pretty good. Let's follow it around, maybe right about there. Just continue following it, watching what we're doing here. Right there might be a little bit of an issue, so I'm just going to take it, I'm going to go around the backside there. There, nice. Looks good, looks good.

Now, let's take this oil pan. We're going to bring it over to the vehicle. We're going to look at the engine again and make sure that everything that we just cleaned off is nice and clean. Odds are, there's going to be a little bit of oil that came down, it's running along the ridges where we just cleaned off. No big deal. We'll grab a rag, we'll clean it down. Okay, friends, so we just walked over with our oil pan. We need to make sure it worked in this discussion real quick. We're going to clean up all of this oil because if we don't, this is where our new oil leak is going to form because the gasket is not going to seal up against the engine in between the oil pan and the engine.

I'm talking a little faster because we have RTV drying on that pan right now. You really only have like a five-minute window. It's not real rush. It's not like you have to wonder which wire you're going to trim or anything like that to try to defuse any situation. We also don't want to wait too long, do we? That looks decent. I'm going to grab my pan. Here we are. It's nice and pretty. Boy, it looks like a kindergartner did that. That's okay.

I'm just going to set it up. Get it close to where I want it and hold it, grab a couple of my bolts. All I'm going to do now is I'm just going to start these in, okay? There we go. We got all these started in, so we know that all the holes are lined up. Now, I can go ahead and I'm just going to bottom them out. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start from the center, boom, boom. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like that, basically. I'm going to start from the center and essentially work my way out. I'm going to grab my 10 mm again.

Here we go, everybody. We've got our torque wrench set to 61 inch-pounds. Once again, I'm starting in the center of the oil pan. There we are. Moving along. I'm just going to go this way. We did all these. We did our 61 inch-pounds. Now, we're going to go ahead and do our oil pan drain plug, 25 foot pounds. The other bolts were 61 inch-pounds, so it was a big difference. See if I can get this. There we are, so that's nice and snug now.

Sometimes in shipping, things tend to loosen up or maybe even the person or machine or whoever it was that put this thing together just kind of put it in real quick. To make sure it doesn't fall out and you get packed it, make sure you tighten it up. If you can't torque it for some reason, I don't know why you wouldn't be able to do it because you just did these, just grab a wrench. Make sure you tighten it up. That right there is your washer inside there, your little crush washer or gasket. You need to make sure that that's nice and snug, squished in between the drain plug and the pan itself, okay, friends?

We're going to let this dry a little bit before we go ahead and add oil because the oil will actually kind of seep into the gasket there and make a mess down the line. We'll just let it set. We'll let it dry for a couple of minutes and we'll get it back down on the ground and we can start looking at things from the top.

We're going to be doing the oil change. We're going to make sure that we want to use a quality filter. Right here, we have a premium grade Nissan oil filter. It's available here at 1A Auto. You just go online, you click it, you order it, get it shipped right to you. We're just going to come behind this little shield right here. Right here is your oil filter. We're going to go ahead and turn that to the left. From my perspective, it's to the right, but from... really, you'd be turning it to the left. We're just going to let that come. It's going to fall into our little waste disposal bucket, not onto the ground. Pull out our filter. We can let that finish draining a little bit. Let it run off we'll say. Makes a nice mess all over everything. Also helps prevent rust.

Let's say that it's pretty much all done draining now. We're going to take our rag, we're just going to go along it just to make sure that the old gasket isn't still on there. If your old gasket is still on there and you put on a filter with another gasket, it's going to be double gasketed and it's not going to hold pressure. It's all right if you got a little it of oil there. That's fine. What you do want to make sure is when you're putting on your new filter, you put a little bit of lubricant around there. You can use a little bit of your old oil if you want. Most people try to use their new oil. Just put it around the edge of the seal. You can even put a little inside there if you wanted to to get it primed up, ready to go. I'm just going to put this on. You can turn it to the left to try to get the threads to start and then go ahead to the right.

We've got it bottomed out. It feels pretty good. I'm just going to give it a little bit more. Make sure that I'm going to go the right way. I'm turning to the right. There we are. We'll clean it down. You can use a little bit of parts cleaner if you want or just a rag. You want to make sure you get it as clean as possible because you're going to want to double check to make sure it's not leaking after you do your oil change. Always just double check ourselves. We don't want any of this oil getting on the ground or into our streams.

All right, friends, now we're going to get ready to add oil. We want to make sure that our oil dipstick is all the way down so it's making a proper seal. Now, we're going to go ahead and we're going to add our oil. This is a four-cylinder engine. We're going to be adding 4.78 quarts. Sounds weird, right? 4.78. Do the best you can. It's not the solid 5, which this container is. Just leave a little bit in there, okay? You can even leave, I don't know, leave maybe have a quart out, and then if you needed to, you can go ahead and run it. If it needs a little bit more, you can add more. It's a lot easier than crawling back underneath and draining a little bit, right? I'm just going to add oil. Be careful not to spill anything. I definitely don't want it getting down onto the ground, contaminating my soil, hurting Mother Nature.

We're going to let this sit for a minute, work its way down. I'm going to grab a rag. I'm going to hold the bottom of the funnel so I can't drip any oil all over the place and make a mess, and we'll move that out of the way. We'll cap it up and then we'll start it up, let it run for a minute or two. Turn it off, let it sit for maybe, I don't know, a minute or so. We'll wait for everything to settle itself back in, and then we're going to pull the dipstick and we're going to check it, okay?

Here we go. We got our oil fill cap. We want to put it on there. We're going to turn it clockwise. We don't want to leave it loose like that. We want to just tighten it up so it bottoms out. Just give it a little bit more. You don't need to grab pliers and really try to reef it on there. If you can go like that, it's probably pretty good. You can even try to turn it loose. If it doesn't come loose with just two fingers, it's probably fine.

Okay, friends, everything is nice and warmed up. It's been sitting for a minute at this point, so I'm going to go ahead and have my rag, gloves on, obviously. I'm going to pull out my dipstick. Right now, I'm just going to clean it off because the oil was probably all the way up here just from running and gurgling and all that stuff. While it's out, we can take a look at it. We see an L. I guess for you it's upside down. There we are. L for Len, or low, whatever you want to say, and H over here, that's high. You got a dot there and a dot there.

Optimally, you want it somewhere maybe like three-quarters of the way up. If not maxed out, right at that top dot. If it's anywhere up above the top dot, well, you're going to need to go back under there and you're going to need to drain some out and get it back below this dot. It's very important. It's better to have it a little bit low, someplace down here, than up above that high mark. I'm not kidding, you're going to mess up your engine. It's going to aerate your oil, mess up your fuel, oil pump, sorry, and could cause engine damage.

Let's push this down, let it sit for a second. Pull it back up. Here we are. As you can tell, we're below the H. That looks really good. Well, it was nice and clean, of course, because we just did it. Perfect. If you want to, you could check it again. I'm not going to worry about it. I'd say that's perfect and good to go.

Thanks for watching. If you want the parts to do it yourself, check out 1aauto.com, the place for DIY auto repair.