What in the heck possesed Jaguar to use a 30 mm oil drain plug?!
 

So I changed my oil twice yesterday. Installed a new filter, ran two bottles of Amsoil engine flush in the old oil for 15 min, drained it (and got oil all down my arm as I couldn't pull the filter out until I loosened a braided stainless wire that was inexplicably zip-tied to the dipstick....).

The engine flush instructions say drain the oil quickly after idling for 15 min, understandable as you don't want any crud depositing back in the engine as the oil cools. So I crawl under the car with two sets of the biggest combination wrenches I own, and only then I really notice the size.....:eek: Good thing I have a good tool selection. I'm crawling around under the car trying various sizes of sockets until a 30 mm one fits. 30 mm?????? :icon_eek: Great. I get my longest ratchet with a well fitting 30 mm 12 pt socket: won't budge. I grab a 1/2" breaker bar, won't budge. Now I'm getting mad. I grab a 24 oz ball pein hammer and wail on the breaker bar: nothing! Ok, now I'm really mad!!!! I get my 1/2" air impact wrench, a 30 mm impact socket with 3/8" universal joint, 3/8-1/2" adapter, and ziiiiiiiiip, off comes the drain plug, completely, spraying oil all over my arm and shirt for a second oil bath. Three points come from this:

1. Why go garage gorillas thing everything needs to be torqued to 200 ft lbs?
2. My kingdom for an auto lift.
3. I should look more carefully before starting something on a new-to-me vehicle.

What on earth was Jaguar thinking? I've never seen a drain plug nut that size in anything, including my Dodge Ram 5.9 Cummins diesel 3500. Is this common in Jaguars, ie a holdover from previous engine designs, or something idiosyncratic to the marque, or a way to keep weekend warriors from changing their own oil, or any other odd thing I can think of?

Yes, older Jags have biggie drain plugs as well (7/8") so I suspect Jaguar has some sort of sentimental attachment to them :).

At 30mm, though, the X300 drain plugs really take the cake. Good grief!

(Aside: I remember buying a huge 1-5/16" wrench to remove rear wheel bearings on my tiny MG Midget. I had to laugh. )

I'll add that the drain plug on my X300 seems to be self-tightening. It always seems very difficult to remove....and, believe me, I *specifically* avoid over-tightening it. I can't explain why this happens. So, don't be too anxious to blame previous repair shops in this case.

I can never remember the drain plug wrench size for all the cars in my family so I finally got smart and wrote 'em all on the wall :)


Cheers
DD

Interesting point about self tightening. The oil was changed by an independent Jaguar repair shop so I was expecting more care than from the acne-filled teenagers populating most quick lubes. I torqued the plug to 35 ft lbs with a torque wrench, so I'll see how it goes this fall when I do my family fleet winterization. At least then I won't be in such a hurry as this change.

It's a nice problem to have, no? So many cars we can't remember the drain plug size/lug nut torque/ oil capacities. I've written them down too. :)

1 5/16" wrench for a...a....Midget? Some engineer was chortling merrily during the design phase I'm sure! I remember having to buy an expensive 34 or 36 mm impact socket from a Mac tool truck simply to remove the PLASTIC oil cartridge housing on an old VW Passat. No one had the right size except in impact.

I had the same reaction the first time I laid eyes on that gargantuan 30mm sucker.:eek: My only other experience with English vehicles was my Land Rover Discovery and darn near every bolt on that was sized to the lugnuts and could be removed with a lugwrench. :icon_imnotworthy: Oil pan, suspension, motor mounts, etc, were all the same size. You could dismantle the entire mechanicals with 3 tools. I remember praising English engineering ingenuity at the time. Then I started wrenching on the Jag, praise officially rescinded.:icon_screwy:

:icon_lol: Funny, and very true!

When I bought my first XJ6 I remember thinking "Wow, these Brits certainly make their engine bays differently than anything I've seen before." There seems to be a bit of national flavour,too. I can tell a German engine bay from a US one usually just by looking. Japanese ones look a bit different than German and US. But then there's Jag......:icon_surprised:

I'm glad I upgraded my mechanics tools over the last few years. It all started when I bought a 25 gal air compressor. That lead to air tools which opened a whole new world of possibilities. That lead to a critical examination of my generally good quality but limited selection of mechanics tools. I'm more of a woodworker so I had a very good selection of those tools. I found another enthusiast website devoted to cars/garages/tools, started regularly looking at their classified's, then on to many other tool websites, and voila: mucho deneiro's and few years later I can salvage Jaguar's bizarrely huge, stuck, oil drain plug with a selection of my own tools. :)

I have a oil extractor pump like for that,just leave it in and suck it out at the dip stick hole , they sell these things at northern tool for about 50.00 or so,it works better than I thought it would, change the filter( of course) Satterfield

I used to think there was something fundamentally wrong with that method of removing the oil, but now that is the factory recommended method for changing the oil on the 5.0 liter XF. There is a tube run down the center of the fill hole for that purpose.

30mm oil plug ....
 

with a bit of humor in mind .... to drain better and faster ....and size matters :icon_omg:!