Did my 40K CKRA engine O&F change for the first time today. I did the DSG last Saturday, but I posted that as a separate thread, since there has been so much commentary on the DSG service and I determined to do the top fill, which I did and all went well.
The engine O&F change didn't turn out to be the bugbear that some have made it out to be. Yes, it's a really tight squeeze to work the filter cap and old filter up out of there, but it just took me a couple of minutes and a little patience and out it came.
Some advice I read somewhere turned out to be good. When the filter cap is completely unscrewed but BEFORE trying to life it out of the housing, wait a few minutes for things to drain. Amazing how much more easily it handles when oil isn't draining off of it.
Replacing the filter and the 3 "O" rings is pretty routine, the smallest "O" ring being the biggest bear to remove. Lubed 'em all and put the new filter back in. At some point when screwing it down, things get tighter when the new "O" ring goes down into the housing, but it takes a couple more turns (it gets a bit easier from there) to get it down flush. It's easy to reach down and feel the gap between the cap and the housing, but in any case it's easy to feel when the cap bottoms out.
The interesting part emerged when I could only change out about 3.2 liters of the oil (nominal 4.5 in the CKRA). I decided to do top fill, and borrowed a friend's Mityvac oil extractor. It worked fine, but with the tube (I used the middle-sized tube, it comes with 3) in as far as I thought it prudent to try to push, it would only take out enough to allow 3.2 liters of new oil (total, including start & drive, re-measure, and top up). I have read about other people having issues extracting all the oil, but the stories seem to vary.
I decided not to put the car up on ramps and do a bottom change at this point, and may decide to do a "short change" at 5K. As long as this oil lasts in Europe, though, with 30K km changes, etc., it may not matter.
So— apart from only getting about 75% of the oil changed that is specified, everything went very smoothly.
