I changed my oil for the first time by myself last night, put in mobile 1. yay.

unfortunately, there's an oil leak. (oil mark on my driveway when I went to work this morning) my question is:

when I fix my leak (assuming it's not from the filter or drain plug) will I have to drain out all the oil I put in first? that mobile 1 stuff isn't cheap, and I'm not looking forward to spending that money again.

 

No reason to throw out that oil. Simply drain it into a clean pan, and when the repair is completed, reinstall it in your engine. Provided the pan you drain into is clean, this should cause you no problems. You may need a good funnel to get the oil from the pan into a container suitable for pouring it back into your engine.

If you take off the engine's oil pan, I suspect you will find "stuff" in the bottom of that pan that will not drain out of the drain hole. You -- obviously -- should not reinstall that in your engine. And you will need some oil to make up for any that you remove. Be certain to put on a new pan gasket when you put the pan back.

You probably also need to check all of the posts in this Lubes section about using synthetic motor oil causing leaks in cars with some age. The theory is that the slipplier synthetic can slip past old gaskets, while the dino oil will not. There is another theory that the "cleaning" action of synthetic oil removes "deposits" that have been keeping the engine from leaking oil. Once those "deposits" are gone, the engine starts leaking oil. Also, it may be some of both of these.

Good Luck

 

Hard to tell without looking at it, but if this is the first you have noticed any leakage from the engine chances are that the dripping is from oil that leaked out when you removed the old filter. I seriously doubt M-1 would cause a leak that quickly, if at all. Recommend you get under the car and wipe down everything good before going through anything more intrusive.

 

thanks for the replies, guys. I solved the problem by tightening the drain plug some more. I'll keep my eye out for future leaks over the lifetime of this oil change.