Fucking Commodores!
A couple weeks ago I was notified by aCar, it’s that time again… service time! We haven’t done enough KM to warrant it, but it’s been 6 months, and I notice a few smells and so on that I’m not happy about, and the squeal on the front in the cold is giving me the rage. Top it off with the fact that I’ve been super busy lately, and I decided to just see if Terry could do it. As usual, he’s fairly booked up, but they got me in about a week ago, with a follow up appointment today.
The oil leak isn’t the usual culprit (apparently the LS1s are famous for doing rear-main seals?), but the sump gasket. That fucking sucks, because replacing it means either the engine comes out or the front crossmember gets dropped, and either one is a fairly extensive procedure. They put a bunch of silicone around it and let it cure all day before I picked it up, in the hopes that’d solve it at least temporarily, but at the follow-up yesterday it seems it hasn’t worked.
Another reason for going back, since the service the transmission has had a very hard shift - both going into first, and going from first to second were extremely savage. They did pressure wash the motor when they were hunting for the oil leak, so maybe that was related? Terry had a poke around, and the result was the most unlikely of places. When they changed the air cleaner, it looks like the Intake Air Temperature sensor had a dodgy connection. The engine had a code for it, no surprises there, but the transmission also had such a code. Fixing the issue and clearing the code solved it - I would never in a million years have picked that!
All the other issues are solved, there’s a couple minor ones left, but for the most part we think that for the age and condition of the Commodore, it’s not really worth spending any serious money on it to resolve the oil leak permanently. If the car was cosmetically as good as it was when we got it, I would strongly consider it, but the clearcoat is finally starting to fail (when we buy a house, I need a decent carport), I managed to break the fuel cap off in Adelaide, it’s just not a very fine specimen of a Commodore any more (though it still drives very well).
So we’re not in a hurry to replace it, but it’s probably time to start thinking about it. :(
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