Basic Car Care: How to Change a Fuel Filter

This is Richard Goms, we're in Murray, Utah, we're talking about basic car care. Right now I'm going to show you how to change your oil filter. We've already got the car up on ramps and we're ready to change the oil filter. This is one kind of a filter wrench that allows you to loosen the filter so that you can loosen it enough so that you can use your fingers to take it off the rest of the way. You have to get this, the wrench around the filter in such a way that you have room to turn it so if there's anything in the way over here, you need to pull the wrench back around a little bit further so that you got room to turn it and loosen it enough so you can get it with your fingers. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn it with the wrench and now its loose enough I can get it off with my fingers. So I'm going to take the wrench away and start loosening this with my fingers. I think I'll actually use a rag because there's going to be a drip, there's going to be leakage OK. Now just let it drip for a while, let that excess oil drip out. OK now these oil filters hold between a pint and a quart of oil and its going to be dirty and it might be warm so you want to be careful how you take this off so you don't get oil all over the place. Now that its down to a drip, I'm going to try to unscrew it the rest of the way. Now I got to be careful because once it goes past the end of the thread, its going to drop out of hands and drop down onto the oil pan. There we go again. We'll just let that drain out a little bit more till it starts dripping again before we take it the rest of the way out. OK I'm going to turn this, now I'm going to be real careful to make sure that it just doesn't drop out of my hand when I get to the last, the end of the thread. Its rather long so you will be turning for a while. But eventually it will come off. Then what I do is I turn it over and let it drain into the pan so that I get as much oil as possible in the pan because we're going to have to recycle that after we're done. OK this is our new filter here, you'll see its nice and clean and what we do is first of all, we have to put just a little bit of oil, now you can use either clean oil or you can use a little dirty oil, its no big deal. You just put a little bit on the rubber seal right here. That allows it once you tighten it, to actually create a better seal to prevent leakage but it also lubricates it so it doesn't dry out and crack and leak. But we're just going to use a small film of oil on there and then we're going to screw it up back up the way we took the other one off. We can just spin that on real easily. And you want to hand tighten it, you don't want to use a wrench when you tighten these because they self tighten, they tighten by themselves. If you use a wrench to tighten it, you may have difficulties to getting it back off again. So we will hand tighten it as tight as we possibly can with our hands. OK then once we get it as tight as possible, then we can get out from underneath the car and fill the engine with oil.