A guy at the shop told me I was wasting time torquing oil pan bolts by feel, so I finally bought a inch-pound torque wrench last week and haven't snapped a bolt since.

He showed me his own setup with a $60 CDI torque wrench and after I snapped my third pan bolt on a Ram 3500 I figured it was worth the money, anyone else have a cheap tool they ignored for way too long?

3 comments

3 Comments

carr.lee1mo ago

Three pan bolts? You gotta be kidding me.

christopher9431mo ago

Agree with @the_elizabeth here. I've stripped a few of those bracket bolts out trying to get the torque right. Three bolts total feels like they designed it during lunch break. Now I'm running two pan bolts and the bracket bolt is just finger tight.

the_elizabeth1mo ago

I know, right? Having three bolts on a pan just seems like overkill, I mean most people are running two and that's been working fine for years. But actually, I think you might be mixing up the bolt count here. The standard setup for these pans is three bolts total, but two of them are actually for the pan itself and the third one is a separate bolt for the bracket that holds the pan in place. So it's not like you're bolting the pan with three bolts to the engine block, it's more like two for the pan and one for the bracket.