By Tony K
A rusty oil pan is what started the partial rebuild of my diesel so I guess it would be prudent to tell you how I solved this dilemma. The only replacement I could find was used and a bit on the expensive side so I decided I would make a new one. All told the parts ran me less than a $100. One of the great things about making a pan is that you can change anything about it. You can make it deeper to hold more oil, you can make it out of thicker material and even paint it some oddball color….
All it took was some angle iron, a bit of ten guage plate (just shy of an eight of an inch) a gear box plug and an arc welder. The rest of the story holds my oil in the bottom of the engine.
Started out by welding a frame that fit the bottom of my engine. This was made from 2 x 2 x 1/4 angle iron. First I marked out and drilled some holes in the angle iron for the gazillion mounting holes. Once the long sides were fit I pieced in the ends with short sections of the same angle iron.
Did some rough cutting of the plate and headed off to the hydraulic press at work. This way I was able to easily and quickly bend the bottom of the pan. A little bit of tack welding and by leaving the sides as yet unattached I was able to check clearances around the oil pick up and the crank.
Added a small piece of quarter inch plate to the angle in the back to create some extra thickness and was able to drill and tap for the drain plug. Which also happens to match all the other drain plugs in the rig, low profile allen head plugs that are magnetic as well.
Pulled it off and stared fitting and welding in the sides. After all the welds were finished it was time for a final dry fit to see how much things warped and lucky for me they didn’t get too far out of shape.
But still one more thing to check before paint, leaks. The easy way to check is with plain old water. Since this pan has never had anything in it, filling it with water and dumping it out was no problem. All I was dumping was clean water. Even though my welds looked good I was surprised by how many leaks I did have, come to think of it there are a still a few that need some attention….
The one thing I never really have to worry about is hitting this pan with something. That and it is so heavily built I can support the back of the engine with it while I pull the tranny and t-case. Jack the tranny off the mounts, support the pan with two jack stands holding a wood block and then set it on the block. Now it’s easy to remove the crossmember prior to removing the tranny from the rig.
