Friday, March 21, 2014

HC Oilpan draining, and Bostig as Apple

I just replied to a recent thread on theSamba that might interest some folks, it was about not being able to get all the oil drained when doing an oil change with the High Capacity oilpan. Original thread is http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7119695


On the draining of the HC Oilpan, without the skidplate you'll get just about eveything out other than the height of the threads and gasket radius needed to seal when level. If you put the driver's wheel up on a ramp or jack it you can get more, but it shouldn't be enough to be worth it.

If you have the skidplate installed all the time, then you need to lift the driver's side and use a bit of cardboard or plastic with a crease to drain it. This is so that no low point (as seen in OEM stock pans) is needed, which increases cost, adds a lower hit point, and would require the entire skidplate to be that much lower.

If you are still suspicious you aren't getting enough, call, email, or submit a ticket and we can figure out if anything else/weird is going on.
furrylittleotter wrote:

I am pleased my stock Subaru pan drains just fine and is still higher that a bostig. Cool 

Neil2, if you're game: with your van on even pavement, can you measure your ground clearance at the lowest point, along with the distance from the ground to your wheel arch (body panel, middle of the bottom edge of the arch) height?

If you have subie stock pan, you should be a couple inches worse off than a Bostig with the HC Oilpan. Early versions used to have worse ground clearance but we are now equal or better to recent subaru based installs we have data for. For instance Syncro Bohttps://www.facebook.com/SyncroBo gained .5" when it was converted from a 2.2L subaru based RMW install, and the Bostig has significantly higher departure angle than all conversions, 1.8t being the lowest departure angle.

I don't take offense to your comments about Apple, I take it as a compliment, and you have an excellent point. The evil part isn't true, but we are very much like Apple. We offer a unified system that will definitely work for anyone that wants to use it. The other options like subaru based installs are more like DIY PCs. You can indeed get excellent bang for the buck if you know what you are doing and put in the time, but you'll have to do a lot more work, and have a lot more expertise to do it. In addition the risks will be higher down the road, just like the Apple vs. PC debate except in gremlins not viruses/malware.

You can read about our philosophy in the blog on the site as to why we believe this is a better approach for those less interested in building/modding vanagons and more interested in travelling/driving vanagons, which is who we build for.

As for the slogan. We just have more conversions/miles than any other vendor (and we are not nearly the oldest either), and all those people trusted us and our products with their money/time/effort. They wrote it for us.

-Jim Akiba