Oil Pan Removal

I did a lot of searching before and during my install of the rear main oil seal. I am not trying to beat a dead horse because I know that this has been covered. Rather, I just wanted to add some more helpful info to those that may be searching. While doing my search I found a lot of discussion about removing the upper half of the rear main which seemed to be a common problem. This was probably the easiest part of the install for me (using advice I got from this forum). I know the job is going to be different for everyone and what may be easy for one can be a real pain for another. That being said the difficult part for me was seperating the oil pan from the engine block. I searched to find threads specific to removing the oil pan but I did not find much advice about actually seperating from the block, mostly the advice I found was about getting the pan out with interference from the front end and steering components. Since my Jeep is lifted this was not an issue for me. My advice to those that may be experiencing trouble with seperating the oil pan from the engine block is a semi-flexible putty knife. I used the putty knife to wedge in between the pan and the block and then tapped it with a hammer to break the seal of the gasket and RTV that had been welding the block to the oil pan for the past 18 years. After tapping the putty knife down one side of the pan I was able to move the pan from side to side to break the seal on the other side and it dropped out. Removing the old gasket material was another bear of a task. Not too difficult but time consuming. I found that a brass wire brush on my air grinder worked well on the pan. I did not want to use this method on the block because I feared getting crap up in my engine so for the block I used the permatex gasket remover (comes in a can and you spray it on) and a good gasket scraper. Hope this helps.

I must say that getting the pan off is a beast. I finally read up on using a long board to hit the pan from the side of the jeep. We used a 4x4 post with the wheel turned way out. I had used a large sledge under the jeep, but this only "clearanced" the oil pan. The post worked great and didn't leave any dents. It fit above the lower controls arms and sat against the deep part of the pan. We had the tranny out while converting to 4wd, so we just pivoted the back of the block up and the pan came right out with no pump removal.