A father-and-son mechanic team has posted a viral video showing confusion over a service bulletin from General Motors and Chevrolet and voiced some serious doubts about it. The bulletin related to how tight the filter needed to be on the vehicle in question.
Royalty Auto Service (@royaltyautoservice) posted the video, which now has more than 843,700 views on TikTok, and it showed the duo working on a 2023 Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. This particular Silverado had a 5.3-liter V8 engine, and it had come in just for an oil change.
“They say it’s just an oil change, but evidently we’ve been doing them wrong for a long time here on these GMs, supposedly,” said the father of the mechanic at the time. “This is the first one we’ve ever had a problem with.” It was something that really perplexed them.
In fact, it did so much because the Silverado came in to them twice. The first time it came in was for the oil change, but it came back again after the owner of the truck reported something wasn’t right because a filter on the vehicle had been leaking.
This Is What the Mechanics Said About the Oil Change
@royaltyautoservice How is this the first issue? 😬 #mechanic #automotive #diy #fyp #viral ♬ original sound – Royaltyautoservice
It was the second visit that got the two men thinking. “First time it came back, Eric’s like, ‘I guess maybe the defective O-ring, the seal on it’s no good,’” the father said. “The second time, that’s when it triggered you, and you’re like, ‘I gotta look up what’s going on here.’” It was then that they found a technical service bulletin about the oil filters.
Eric, the son in this team, found that aside from familiar steps like lubricating the new gasket with clean engine oil, it had something that caught them by surprise. The bulletin said to torque the oil filter to 20 newton metres, and Eric said that was a massive amount for an oil filter. The filter they had to take off had only been put on ten minutes earlier, and it in itself was a nightmare to take off as it had tightened up after the truck had run.
“These things tend to tighten up after they’ve run. This is why you don’t ever over-tighten them,” said Eric. The mechanic said he has had to take a chisel and chisel around the metal ring of the filter in the past on some vehicles due to how tight they become. It was as the new filter went on that they became unsure as to whether the GM bulletin was one that they should be following.
The Mechanics Felt They Were Putting the Filter on Too Tight
“That’s got to be the tightest oil filter I’ve ever seen put on in my life right there,” said Eric. The quality of parts wasn’t an issue either. The father and son duo confirmed that they were running the best filter they could get, so they were not worried about the part failing. They were just incredibly concerned about how tight it seemed they had to put it on, according to the manufacturer who owned the truck builder.
There is one interesting discrepancy to note. A revised specification from GM states that for an oil filter, “If installing with a torque wrench, this should be approximately 10 N·m of torque.” That is half what the bulletin said, according to the two mechanics in the video. According to one commenter, however, that refers to filters from ACDelco, which isn’t what was going into this truck. It did appear to be a confusing situation for the mechanics to be in.