Replacing the oil in a Ford Ka (2008)

A few years ago, I bought a Ford Ka (2008). The small car has been doing great for me, and hasn’t had any issues besides the squeeking accessory belt that I bought it with. Replacing said belt was fairly easy, but did require more strength than I expected. But besides that, I have not had any issues in the last 30.000 km that I drove in two years.

Cars have lots of moving parts, and need maintenance. I am a noob when it comes to automotive techniques. My experience boils down to having helped my dad many while replacing a headgasket in a 1993 Citroen AX years ago, and a few other small maintenance jobs such as replacing an alternator in a Renault 4. The Ka has driven over 30.000 km without any maintenance, which is out of any recommended advice that I could find online. That is why I decided to change the oil and the oil filter, as it would probably prolong the life of the Ka; and as a bonus it’d be good practice for other maintenance jobs that might be required in the future.

Getting the required materials

Replacing the oil, and oil filter in a Ford Ka requires suprisingly little tooling, you need the following supplies:

1. New oil (duh!)
2. A new filter
3. A tool to remove the previous oil filter

This is a picture of the filter that I bought, together with the new oil:

There are online stores like autodoc; but they often sell me incompatible parts (even when they claim that is is compatible!), so I recommend using a local store to avoid the hassle of returning items to online stores. This time I used autodoc, and got sold an incompatible oil filter, sigh.

Executing the change

The actual oil change is suprisingly simple, and because I am lucky, its also incredibly well documented by Haynes, for free. The process can be described in a few simple steps:

1. Remove the oil-filler cap
2. Position a container under the car’s sump
3. Remove the drain plug and drain the oil in the container.
4. Remove the oil filter using the removal tool, and drain in the container
5. Tighten the drain plug again to 28 Nm torque
6. Tighten the new oil filter by hand, as tight as it’ll go
7. Slowly add oil until the dip stick shows the oil at the upper mark

Here is a collection of photos that I took while replacing the oil:

It all worked fine in the end, and there were no big hurdles. If it will last, or my engine will blow up in the coming weeks is something that remains to be seen however. The new oil was a LOT clearer than the old oil; which was a very dark brown.