I drained the oil from the Ferrari 330GTC I’m assembling from paint, getting it ready for start up. It’s been dormant for a few years, and I’ve never done any mechanical work on this car before it went away for paint. I saw there was a slight leak around the drain plug and found the reason when the plug was removed. There were two washers and some kind of non stock plug sealing the bottom of the oil pan and not doing a good job at it. Since it’s not that hard to drop the bottom of the pan to repair this problem, I started to make this right.

Although the oil drained out the drain plug, I found a lot of sludge in the bottom of the pan trapped in all the baffling. I could see the bottom of the engine with the pan removed, and everything looked clean, but that wasn’t what was collecting at the bottom of the oil pan. I’m not sure what the source of the sludge was, but perhaps it was from the oil sitting for so long at the bottom of the pan. I also found there was a lot of silicone used to seal the bottom of the oil pan without a gasket. Luckily none of the squeeze out had broken off yet and collected on the oil pan pick up, I ordered an oil pan gasket, and using less sealant when it comes time to put it all back together. Removing the oil pan was fortuitous because I wouldn’t have seen any of these issues simply by draining the oil.

You can see how the bottom of the Ferrari oil pan is baffled, so there were a lot of places dirt and sludge can collect. Once cleaned out, I’ll get the bottom of the pan welded, and re-tapped to accept the correct oil pan plug. I know there are repair kits to fix this plug, but I’d rather have it welded and repaired to the original spec and stock oil drain plug.