How to Change Oil in Most Cars - Subject Car 1994-97 Honda Accord

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In this video, we're going to show you how to do an oil change on this '95 Accord with a V6. The process for changing oil is pretty much the same for just about any car. You may need a jack and jack stands if your car sits low, a wrench depending on the size of your oil drain, catch pan, oil filter wrench, obviously some oil and gallon jugs and a funnel for waste oil.

Oil changes are really similar on any car. You can see on this Accord, I've got it up on a lift and I know most of you aren't going to have the spoils of a lift. What you need to do usually is you'll want to jack up your car and on this Accord, you can place your jack . and I'm right here under the center. There's the license plate frame. There's a little hook right here. You can place your jack right under here, lift the car up a little bit. You'll want to place a jack stand behind the rear wheel here for safety.

What you're going to need is a wrench. Your drain is right here. It's on the back of the oil pan, close to the passenger's side wheel. Again, just like most cars, either the oil pan is a square or rectangular shape pan that hangs down. It has a drain plug either on the rear, or it could have it on the front or it could have it on the either side. Changing the oil is pretty easy, you want to remove that plug, drain your oil down into your catch pan and after you've drained your oil then you want to take off your oil filter and you'll need an oil filter wrench for that. I'll show you that in a minute. Then you put your new oil filter on and refill the oil.

Here, I'm using a 17mm wrench and obviously that's going to differ from car to car and take out the bolt. Once you get it to a point where you can turn it, what you want to do is you want to loosen it up and I'm pushing it towards the oil pan until I can feel that the threads are all out and then I can pull it out quick. There's the oil draining out.

You can see my oil's still draining and now I'm going to remove the oil filter. Generally this what your oil filter is going to look like and it's going to be . on this Accord it's kind of nicely placed right near the passenger wheel here. If you have it jacked up, you can turn your wheel like this to the right and easily get in to get it. On other cars, it may be placed differently but generally it's going to look the same. This is an oil filter wrench, it goes onto the filter and then as you turn it grips it and then it's the same thin. I'm going to take it down. You're going to get some oil that comes out and as I get near the end, I'm going to hold it up against where it's bolted on. Here comes some of the oil. Then I'm going to dump it out into my catch pan and let it drain into the catch pan. I have my filter off and my oil is still draining, I'm going to just let that go until it stops dripping. Sometimes I let these go for much as an hour to get as much as the old oil out as you can and what I'm going to do is wipe down where the oil filter goes on and get as much of the old oil off as I can.

Here's my new filter and you can see I just poured a little bit of oil right in here. I'm just going to take that oil and I'm going to coat this rubber gasket a little bit. Then I'm going to take my new filter and put it right up, obviously, where the old one was. Get it on there, and then, once it's seated pretty tight like that, I'll take my oil filter wrench and I'm going to tighten it up about another 3/4 of a turn and that's it.

Oil's down to a slow drip here, so I'll wipe off the drain plug and re-install it. Once you feel it get tight, get it nice and tight. Just one other note on draining is if you jack your car up, on this Honda it would be fine because you jack it up and the oil pan will tilt towards the back and more oil will drain out, but if, say, your plug's on the front and you jack it up and you tilt your oil pan back, what you'll want to do is get the oil draining. Then, obviously, when you're not under there, let the car down so that as much oil as possible can drain out and then rejack it up and put your jack stand underneath and then finish up.

On many cars, the oil cap will actually have the recommended oil, this one does not so here's the manual and, in this one, it's nicely listed in the back page. You can see recommend engine oil is 5W/30. If your book doesn't list right in the back page, what you'll want to do is go to your index and look for engine specifications and also engine tune-up or capacities and one of those sections will have the oil type in it. Generally, most newer vehicles as of when this video was taken are using 5W/30 no matter what the engine size for regular gasoline engines. If you have an older vehicle, four and six cylinder engines usually use the 5W/30. Larger, V8 engines sometimes will use 10W/30 and if you have a lot of wear on your engine, a lot of miles, you might even what to go to 10W/40 which is a little bit thicker. We'll now put in . this recommends 4.4 quarts of oil, so we'll put in 4 quarts, and check the oil. We'll start it up, because you need to start the engine up to circulate the oil and get it into that oil filter and then you want to check the oil again and top it off if necessary.

As this last quart is going in, here's a word about oil. I'm putting private label oil in here. I happen to know that this oil is brand name. It just doesn't have a brand name bottle. What you put in your car depends on your budget, synthetic or non-synthetic. Synthetic does last longer, you pay more, but synthetic you can generally run for 10,000 to 12,000 miles, whereas regular oil you should probably change between 3,000 and 5,000 miles. Also synthetic is proven to be better for the engine, so if you have a newer car and you want it to last a long time, I would recommend going to a synthetic. This is an older car with a lot of miles on it so we're not going to spend a whole lot of money on the oil, we're just using the private label stuff. That's in.

The oil dipstick is right here, pull it out, wipe it off, put it back in, pull it out, and you may not be able to see it but the oil is between the two dots so that means it has enough for now. Now we'll start it up, check the oil pressure gauge, wait for the oil light to go off and we'll check the oil again. Wipe it off, back down in and out. You can see our oil is down below the dot so we'll put some more in. Wipe up our oil a little bit. One more check. Oil is nice and close to that dot so we're all good.

You can see my waste oil actually went into this nice convenient jug. What I suggest you do with your waste oil is take your catch pan and get a funnel and put the oil into old milk jugs or radiator fluid jugs or some kind of gallon jugs. You'll probably need two of them. You can take it to a repair shop and they usually have a big tank they'll let you pour it into or you can take it to your local landfill or recycling center and they generally have a depository for waste oil. As far as the oil filter goes, what you can do is wipe it down then rinse it and flush it with some warm soapy water and then you can throw it in your trash or recycle it as a metal recyclable.

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