How to Replace Oil Cooler Gasket 2007-12 Nissan Altima

All right. So, I took off the right front wheel because to me it makes it much easier to get in there, but technically you don't have to. You can come right through the bottom here. So, what we're gonna do first is, of course, try to clean down the area to try to get off the majority of the gunk that's around there because this is the unit we're going to be removing. After you clean it all down, we're going to take off this little connector right here. Just give it a squeeze and then it should want to draw off of there. Once you get that off, you're going to come right up here and you can feel these rubber hoses. We're going to take those clamps off and then remove the hoses. But before we do that, I like to mark the hose and mark the base of this so I know which hose goes where. Put a nice big crayon mark on there. And that's the lower hose or the one that is down lower, at least to me. Mark this, even though it's probably going to get washed off. There we go. Beautiful. Now, I'm going to try to take my hose clamp pliers and get these clamps off of here. Slide that right up the hose.

I do the same for the other one. You just want to make sure you have a bucket under there so we can catch any coolant that might come out of this. We don't want it getting on the ground. That's one hose. The other one came right off. There it is. We'll let that drain as well. Once these are completely drained, we'll clean up our mess a little bit before we stick our faces under there and then we'll continue on. So, next, we're going to remove the 12-millimeter mounting bolts. You have one here and one down there, and there's also two-12 millimeter mounting nuts. So, we're gonna remove all four of those. Just going to leave that in a little bit.

Let's draw this away from the engine. A little bit of oil comes out. All right. Let's get it out of here. Right here's one of the gaskets we're going to remove. Let's just draw that right off of there. So, we made our way over to the bench so we can work on this. What we need to do now is take off these four 10-millimeter headed bolts so we can get to where this gasket is.

Separate that. We need to clean up this area so it's a nice smooth surface and we're going to replace this gasket right here. Just going to use a nice flat razor blade here and just clean up this area. You need to make sure you get any raised areas off of this. It's very important. That looks pretty great. I'm just going to clean it up with some parts cleaner, make sure it's clean and then we'll move along to cleaning up the other side. Just make sure you shake it and get any parts cleaner that you may or may not have gotten inside the hole out of there. Get this out of there, there's our new seal. Just match it up. Looks about the same in exception of it's just not flattened out from being on there forever. Pocket screwdriver. Yeah, same thing. Nice. Let's clean down our area on this one. If you have any raised areas, make sure you clean those off. Pretty good, let that dry. Make sure you get all the oil out of there. Now, you're going to move along to this side right here and just make sure that's fully clean and flat too. If you have any raised areas, just clean it up with your razor blade. So, I just coated the gasket with a tiny bit of lubricant here. It's gonna look like that. Grab our unit, make sure it matches up.

It's gonna go just like this. Okay? We're going to have that hole line up with this one and this hole line up with that area. And in case you can't figure out which way it goes, just pay attention to the way that this goes. You've got this little bump that comes up. It can really only go one way.

Okay. I'm just going to grab a regular ratchet. Just double-check to make sure they're snug. Nice. Let's go back to the vehicle. We're back at the vehicle. Let's make sure we clean down this mounting area. I'm just going to double-check for raised areas with my razor blade. Wipe it back down one last time. That looks really good. Let's mount it. Let's get our gasket up on here. I'm just gonna put it right over these studs. Make sure it lines up with the holes. You definitely don't want to have this on backwards, it'll cause major issues. That looks great. Grab the oil cooler. We'll get it up on here, past my flashlight. Just right over those studs, just like that. Now, we're gonna grab our mounting nuts. We'll start those on with studs. I'm not going to tighten anything up until I get all these bolts studded in. The longer of the two mounting bolts goes to the top obviously. The shorter one, right here. Now, that they're all started, we're going to bottom them out and then we'll torque them to manufacturer specifications. Start with the nuts here.

The torque for these bolts is between 33 and 39-foot pounds. Let's see if I can get my socket up on there. Torqued. Let's grab our hoses. Remember that there's one hose that we marked, so I'm going to grab the opposite one, which was the upper hose. I'm going to start with that. Move that lower hose out of the way. Okay. Push that onto the cooler as far as it'll go, and then just squeeze the hose to make sure that there's plenty of hose going over that cooler tube. Now, I'm going to grab this clamp and I'm going to slide it down. Now that we have that hose on, we're going to do the same for this one. Okay. Just a little down just above the very end of that. Now that that's on, we're just going to double-check to make sure I can feel the metal tube of the cooler. Yup. It's all the way up here so we know our clamps definitely on that metal tube. Awesome. Make sure you plug this back in. Give it a tug. Very nice.

All right. So, we're back underneath the hood, and if you happened to remove the wheel, go ahead and put it back on and torque it down to 83-foot pounds. We're going to come right over here. You can check your oil right there. If you need to add which you'll more than likely will, you're going to go right here. We also need to check the coolant, so we're just going to check it. It's definitely not hot. I mean, we just had it all apart so it hasn't gone anywhere. Open this up. Check your cap. Make sure it's not cracked. Everything looks decent. Here's where you're going to add. We're going to add, top it off. Check our oil, top that off. It needs to be topped off. Take it for a road test. Come on back and make sure there's no leaks under there.