How to Change Engine Oil 1998-2005 Lexus GS300

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're working on our 2001 Lexus GS 300. I'm going to show you something very basic. We're going to be doing an oil change. Super easy. I can do it. You can do it too. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com, thanks.

So first what we're going to do is we're just going to pop the hood. We've got some nice hood pistons here. They're going to hold the hood up, but just in case, you want to make sure, I like to give them a little tug just to see how easy it comes down. I don't want this coming down, hitting me in the head. It seems pretty decent. If they're weak, you can use a little prop rod or something like that or even some locking pliers if you needed to. I'm not going to worry about any of that. This one seems decent. We can get right over here to our oil cap. Right on the oil cap itself, it tells you what type of oil to use. 5W-30. So that means you don't want to use 0W-20, you don't want to use 10W-40, 50 and 40, anything like that just go with whatever's specified by the manufacturer. They knew what they were doing when they made the car. I'm going to go with what they wanted.

We'll set this right over here next to where the hood latch is and that's just so after we're done filling the oil or whatever we're doing, maybe we get into a conversation and we happen to forget that we didn't put the oil cap on. Close the hood. It's not going to go down and latch, right? It's going to come down, bonk, why won't my hood shut? Oh, I forgot my cap. I can't believe that. I almost forgot it. So we'll put that there. It's just a precautionary measure. While you're under the hood, it's always a great time to check your fluids. You can check your air filter, which is right over here. It's easy peasy. Power steering fluid. Here's your oil dipstick. You've got your brake fluid reservoir over here, and of course some washer fluid. It's always nice to make sure you top that off.

Assuming you checked all your fluids, you've got your oil cap off, now it's time to start draining some oil so you can either climb underneath the car, you can put it up on some ramps safely. Everything needs to be safe. So use your best judgment. We're going to use a lift for this particular application, but you do you boo-boo. So let's get under it and we'll continue.

Okay, so now that we're underneath the vehicle, we have a clear eye view of everything we're going to be dealing with. Here's where we're going to drain the majority of our oil from. This is your oil pan and your drain plug. We're going to drain the oil straight into a recycling receptacle and then also right up in there, that's your oil filter. It's not really super hard to reach, but it's not like some other vehicles where maybe they put it, ooh, someplace super easy to get. We can get it. It's not, none of this is going to be hard for us. And then of course, while you've got it around, if you can check your tire pressure, that's always a good idea. And this is rear wheel drive. So we would also, you could check your drive shaft, walk down, give it a nice little shake.

Come up here. We've got a little a pinion seal leak over here, so that's letting differential fluid out. Give that a little shake. We'll check the differential fluid as well for the oil change. There's a check plug right up here. It's a check/fill plug and then right down here would be obviously the drain plug. We'll get to all that in a minute though. So let's move on to the next step of draining the oil.

So we're going to remove our drain plug. We've got our catch bucket right underneath it. We've got our hand protection, eye protection, and a 14 millimeter wrench with a rag available. Let's get it on there, break it free. There is a gasket, a drain plug gasket. Sometimes it comes out with the drain plug. Other times it'll stick to the drain pan. Either way we're going to take that gasket off of either one it's stuck on, which looks like it's going to be the drain pan or oil pan. And we'll check it out, inspect it. If it needs to be replaced, we'll replace it. I'm just going to get my recycling receptacle ready here. Get our drain plug out of here, it might come splashing down. There we are. Now we're going to let that drain until it comes to a very minimal trickle.

We're going to go right up to the check plug here and we're going to remove this. To do that, I'm going to use an Allen head socket and this is a 10, 10 millimeter Allen head. I'm just going to put it up in here. I'm going to turn it counter clockwise. My socket out of there. Fluid may come out of this. So you want to make sure that you have your safety glasses on, your hand protection of course, and something to catch any fluid that might come out. So it's definitely full. I'm just going to put that there for one second. All right, so I grabbed a little rag, nice and clean on the end here. I'm just going to try to drip a little bit onto this, so I can see exactly what the fluid looks like. There we are.

So there's our fluid. Looks nice and clean. So your fluid looks good in this. And of course it's full because when I opened up the fill plug, a little bit of fluid came out. It didn't really come roaring out or anything. So I'm not thinking that it's overly full and it's also not super low where I pulled the plug and nothing came out. I stuck my finger, with my pinkie. Usually you stick your pinky in and you go down and sometimes you get like all the way down this far and you can't even feel any fluid. So that's kind of what I was expecting where we've got a little bit of a fluid leak here. But it looks like the fluid level's looking good. So I'm just going to go ahead and close this up. I'm going to use the same tool I used to remove it, of course. Probably don't need to say that, but say it anyway.

Just get it in there. It's bottomed out. Just give it a little bit more and then that's it. We'll clean it up. Not that it's going to help it out too much here, but we made a little mess. So let's just pick up the mess we made. There we are, and that's how you check your differential fluid. Easy peasy.

So we're going to check this drain plug gasket. Just pull it down off of there. I like to clean them up and just take a look at it. Sometimes you'll see them, they're completely crushed and kind of like splitting out at the edges or they just look really cruddy and cracked. This one actually looks fairly decent. If I had access to a new one, I would probably replace it anyway. But since I don't, I'm not really going to make the phone call and see about getting one. So I'm just going to grab my drain plug. I'll clean that off because going into the recycling receptacle, it got a little dirty, make sure it's nice and clean along the threaded area. And then of course along the base where the seal's going to ride. We're going to take our seal or gasket, call it what you want, take my rag, clean that up.

So as you can tell, minimal oil is dripping out of this at this point. It's drained out pretty well. Well I say minimal, but it's really, oh no, there is a drip. Look at that. Told you. Anyway, we'll get that in there. Okay, now you don't want to walk away from this. Drain plugs either need to be all the way in or all the way out. So we're just going to use our wrench. We're going to snug that up right now, going to take it until it bottoms out like that. I'll just give it a little bit more. Wipe down our mess. Can spend a whole bunch of time wiping all this down if you wanted to or clean it up another way. Even fix the oil leak. That might be nice to me. But anyway, now we're going to take our oil bucket. We're going to come right over here to where our oil filter is, right up there. I'm going to see if I can grab this by hand. A lot of times you'll have to use an oil filter wrench. Let's see.

I'm trying to turn it counterclockwise. It's not turning, so I'm just going to grab my oil filter wrench and we'll move along. So we've got our oil filter wrench. Nothing special about it. We're going to make it so when we have the oil filter going through, you turn to the left or counterclockwise. It's going to tighten up. Okay, so it's going to squeeze up against the filter and we'll have grip and we'll be able to turn the filter out of here. If you're laying down on the ground trying to do this, it might be easier to try to get it from up top, but since I'm under here now, I'm just going to see if I can get it right here. It feels like it loosened up quite a bit.

I've got my collection receptacle under. Here comes our oil filter. It's going to let out a little bit of oil. So you want to make sure that you have your collection bucket. Try to save the earth. Everybody's got to do their part, right? So as you can tell, this makes quite a mess. We've got our oil filter out of here, I'm going to let this finish doing its thing. I'll go grab my new oil filter and we'll continue.

Okay, so now what we're going to do is we're just going to prime our oil filter. We need to keep in mind that our oil filter is not straight up and down, so we don't want to fill it all the way up to the top. The filter is going to be sitting pretty much like this. So all I'm going to do, I'm going to take a little bit oil. Just going to put a little bit in there. The oil that got up on here, that's okay. I'm going to take it, I'm going to go right around the lip, along this rubber gasket here, and that's going to make it so when we put the oil filter on, it's going to be lubricated and it's not going to stick directly to the engine.

And also later on down the line for the next oil change, when we go to remove our oil filter, the gasket is not going to stick. So now that we have some oil along the gasket here and we have some oil inside the filter, we'll go back over to the vehicle and we'll clean up the area where the filter is going to go on.

Okay, so we're just going to take our rag and we're going to go up and we're going to clean the base of the engine where the oil filter is going to go on to. The reason for that is because we want to make sure that there's no debris, nothing fell down in there. There's no dirt or crud or anything like that that might've made its way in between where the filter and the engine is going to be. And secondly, because maybe you took off your oil filter and you don't have your gasket on there, if that happens, you can of course check your recycling receptacle and that's where this one is. But if it's not in here and it's not on your filter, more than likely it's stuck up there. Now we'll go with the assumption that it's still stuck up there. And you go ahead and you put your new filter on there. With its own gasket, you're going to have a rubber gasket against a rubber gasket that's called double gasketing, which is a pretty basic term, and it essentially is just going to leak.

You're not going to be able to get your oil filter down tight enough, and it's going to be under pressure, so it'll start forcing fluid out from in between the two seals and you're going to have an issue. So just take the extra time, wipe down your mounting area up there, make sure it's clean of any debris. And of course the gasket, like I just said. And now we'll grab our oil filter and we'll continue.

Okay, so we've got our pre-lubed oil filter here. We've got it on the gasket. We know we don't have a gasket still up there. Let's go ahead and get our oil filter up there. Just going to go straight up here. I'm going to turn it clockwise this time, righty tighty, lefty loosey. Okay. So it's pretty snug, right? I bottomed them out, I went a little bit more, but it's still moving fairly easily. So now I'm just going to go until it stops wanting to move easily and then I'm just going to give it a little muscle. Like that. You don't need to use an oil filter wrench to go ahead and tighten this down, unless of course you were working on a diesel, but we don't have a diesel Lexus GS 300 here. So you don't have to worry about that. That's going to be plenty tight.

Now we'll grab a little bit of parts cleaner. We need to make sure that the engine's cold or cool at this point, you don't want it to be super hot because of course if you're spraying parts cleaner up in there and it touches up against something hot, exhaust or whatever might be up there that's super hot, you could have obviously potential for a fire hazard. And I don't want anybody getting hurt, so I'll make sure your engine's cool and grab some parts cleaner and clean it down.

All right. We're just going to spray this down. Obviously when you take off the oil filter, I'm sure yours is doing the same thing this one did. It came down on this side of the subframe, came down over here. It's literally just everywhere. This already has plenty of oil leaks, but I'm just going to do the best I can and try to get off the majority of this. So hopefully as much as possible will go into my collection receptacle and it'll get recycled properly instead of, God forbid, going into the ground and contaminating anything and hurting any animals or Mother Earth. So I'll just clean this up and I'll come over, we'll just hit where the drain plug was. Make sure that's nice and clean. You want this to be dry as possible because after we start it up, we'll just take a peek under here and just make sure that there's no oil coming out from that gasket. So there we go. Let's move along.

So we've got our funnel into the fill hole. We're going to add our 5W-30 oil. It's 5.7 quarts total. So I've got myself a five gallon jug here. I'm just going to put in this whole jug and then we have a single quart. I'm going to start with half that quart and then we'll top it off as needed. So here's our sixth quart, I guess you would say. And we're going to go right to the half-quart line and then by the time we're done, we'll probably be down around here, but we'll go to here and then we'll run it, check it, and we'll add as needed. Bit more here. There we are, half a quart. Close this up.

So we're just going to take our oil cap. Just get it on here. Okay, so now we'll just make sure that the oil dipstick is down completely. You don't want it up. All right. This is down, it's looking good. When your vehicle's running and you have it up to the regular running temperature, you can check your transmission fluid, which is located right down here. Get your little tranny dipstick, pull it out, wipe it off, put it back in, pull it back out. If the vehicle is hot, you want it to be up inside this range. If the vehicle's cooled off, you want it to be down here, but optimally, when you're checking it, you want it on a level surface and you want it to be hot, so you'd be looking for up inside these levels. Just a note. Now I'm going to go ahead and get inside the vehicle, start it up, let it run for a second, turn it back off and we'll check the oil level.

All right, let's start this puppy up. Just let it run for a second here. No lights on, on my dash. Everything looks good. Come over here with our rag and pull it, wipe it right off. Put it in, leave it in for a second. Pull it straight out. Take a look. So here's the maximum level, and then all the way down there at that other dot is the minimum. As you can see, we're floating down near the minimum there. Between the lower dot and the upper dot is approximately a quart. As long as you're pretty much anywhere in between the bottom dot and the upper dot, you're doing all right. I like to have it just below the upper dot though. So I'm just going to add a scotch more and then we'll check it again. So there we are just below the maximum dot. I like it. I love it. I'm going to finish up now. Get that on there. Make sure everything's nice and clean. We got all of our covers shut. All right, we'll close the hood and down the road we go.

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