I’ve been dreading this oil leak for a long time. I thought the problem was with the crimp, or that the piece wasn’t removable and that I had fouled up the whole project when I cut the front off the car.

But!!! I didn’t!! The culprit was the gasket that goes between this:

And the block, here:

The gasket was dented inwards, and was brittle, there is no way it would ever seal again. I don’t understand why the gasket failed… This is one of those gaskets with no moving parts, and if it was designed properly, it would have never failed. Oh well.

I hear these are expensive, so I used the gasket from an oil filter of the right size instead of getting a new one (if you even can) from Ford. The guy at Checkers was nice and let me open about 2 dozen oil filters before I found one with the right size seal. The oil filter gasket pops right out of the filter, but it is too tall. I was able to trim it some by cutting it flush with the oil filter surface while it was still in the oil filter.

You can see the pictures below. If anyone is interested, the od of the seal needs to be 72.5mm, My gasket is 72.0mm, but it should be fine. The machined surface of the block has an O.D. of ~78mm, and an I.D. of ~60mm.

Tags: '93 SHO, SHOTruck