Classic Car Maintenance Tips: Priming the Oil Pump

You got this engine pretty much ready to start the final assembly point, but one of the one big, big, big thing that you need to do is prime the oil system. It's often overlooked a lot of guys will just use a starter to do it but if you do that, you're actually turning the engine over, turning the, the all the bearing surfaces over to try and get oil, to those bearing surfaces that you want to protect. So a better way to do it is to use an oil pump. I mean, it's just a drive tool is all it is because the oil pump in this case drives off the distributor. You can buy a special tool like that. Mine that I have right here, it was 1985. I was in high school shop class and we had an engine about to this point in the shop instructor came by and said, did you prime your oil system? And we all looked at each other and said, did we, what? So he said, you got to prime that oil system or you're going to burn up some bearings or you could burn up some bearings. So I said, well, how do you do that? And he said, go down and talk to the motor shops. See if you can get the special tool that you need to, to turn that oil pump with alternate anything on the engine. So I went down to the motor shop and he had he had a tool that looked similar to this. It wasn't this exact one, but he said you can buy one, but it's like $20. And that was 1985. That was a lot of money back then. So anyway, he said, just take an old distributor cut the top off, drive the gear off and use that. And I said, well, I have an old distributor. Cause we put an XL distributor system in that in that particular car. So I went home that night, got my old distributor took it back to shop class. The next day we drove the pin out and knocked the gear off and took a hacks on cut the top off. So almost 30 years later, I still haven't welded a nut on there so we could drive it with an air tool. So anyway, what we're going to do with this is we're going to drop it down into the distributor hole and we're going to put an area in Shaun here and just spin it up. And then just for, just for this, I mean the only reason we did this, put this gauge in here we put an oil pressure gauge in here just so we can make sure we've got oil pressure going everywhere. It needs to go. So I'm gonna go ahead and drop that thing in there and spin it up and we'll be able to watch the gauge. So I'll drop in. Okay. So we're in there. I'll just take an air in. yeah, we were getting about, we were getting about 10 pounds of, 10 pounds of oil pressure. So I know the is moving through this thing. I'm going to go ahead and run this for about 15 seconds or so just to make sure oil gets everywhere. It needs to go. And then I'm going to pull that out and we'll be ready to drop the distributor in.