“That is a massive amount…”
A shop that estimates that it has done thousands of oil changes on GM trucks had one come back twice, leaking at the filter they had fitted both times. They found a service bulletin telling them to tighten the filter far harder than anyone would by hand. The father-and-son team filmed themselves doing it while voicing serious doubts about whether this was a good idea.
Royalty Auto Service (@royaltyautoservice) posted a video of the process which has so far drawn more than 843,700 views. The truck is a 2023 Chevrolet Silverado with the 5.3-liter V-8. “They say it’s just an oil change, but evidently we’ve been doing them wrong for a long time here on these GMs, supposedly,” the father says. “This is the first one we’ve ever had a problem with.”
The second visit is what changed their thinking. “First time it comes back, Eric’s like, ‘I guess maybe the defective O-ring, the seal on it’s no good,’” the father says. “The second time, that’s when it triggered you and you’re like, ‘I gotta look up something’s going on here.’”
What Eric found was a technical service bulletin about oil filters. It does describe some familiar steps, including lubricating the new gasket with clean engine oil, but the pair found one step surprising. “Torque the oil filter to 20 newton metres,” he says. “That is a massive amount for an oil filter.”
The filter they took off had been fitted 10 minutes earlier and run briefly, and as a result it was already difficult to remove. “These things tend to tighten up after they’ve run. This is why you don’t ever over-tighten them,” he says, recalling jobs where he “had to cut the filter completely off and take a chisel and chisel around on the metal ring to get them off.”
As he fit the new one on camera, he sounded unconvinced about what he was doing. “That’s got to be the tightest oil filter I’ve ever seen put on in my life right there,” he says. “We’re going to have to just monitor this, I guess, I don’t know.”
He says the parts are not the issue. “It’s not like we’re using a cheap filter, that’s the best filter you can get,” he says of the Wix unit going on, before landing on the lesson he takes from it: “This is exactly why you look stuff up, because we’ve done thousands of them.”
GM’s published bulletin was filed with federal safety regulators, but that document does not line up with the job in the video.
The document describes owners reporting “an oil leak coming from underneath the front of the vehicle after a prior oil service was performed,” a leak that “can take several thousand miles to occur.” The cause GM gives is the opposite of a filter done up too hard: “Technicians may also notice that the filter is very easy to remove and can sometimes be removed by hand.”
The revised specification reads: “Lubricate the NEW oil filter gasket with clean engine oil. Install Oil Filter 1 full turn after gasket makes contact with the sealing surface on the filter mounting flange. If installing with a torque wrench, this should be approximately 10 N·m of torque.”
The figure in the bulletin is half the 20 newton metres applied in the video. The document covers model years 2000 to 2022, however, and this truck is a 2023. And it is written for ACDelco filters, listing them by part number, while the filter going onto the Silverado is a Wix.
One commenter spotted the last point without the paperwork in front of him. “This TSB pertains to ACDelco oil filters,” wrote johnellison443.
The most-liked comment sympathized with the hypothetical home mechanic who has to deal with a filter screwed on that tightly. “Sucks to be the guy at home changing his oil after that,” wrote jes_meds. Damonstevens12 saw the same problem arriving later: “Gonna be hammering that filter back off in 4,000 miles.”
Plenty of people thought the fix was a result of poor manufacturing. “Leave it to GM to machine a block so badly you have to crush the oil filter gasket as a last resort to stop leaks,” wrote shadowpup1705. Tman0196 called it “a half-[expletive] fix for terrible machining tolerances,” and jforestz34 made the statistical case: “If you’ve done thousands and this is the first truck you’ve had an issue with, there is something wrong with the truck.”
Others suggested changing filter brands. “Try an ACDelco filter,” wrote ryno.hickerson. “I’ve worked at a GM dealership for the last six years and have never experienced this.”
Trade guidance tends to send installers back to the part rather than the truck. Vehicle Service Pros, writing of gasket leaks, says: “Usually it’s simply a matter of tightening the filter to the manufacturer’s specifications, typically printed on the side of the filter.”
Motor1 reached out to Royalty Auto Service via TikTok direct message and to General Motors and Wix Filters by email for comment. We’ll be sure to update this if any respond.
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