I know I might sound dumb, but is this the oil drain plug for my 3.0? what the heck does it do?

what is the spring loaded lever for? some kind of quick drain?

 

That looks like a Fumoto valve, but I can't say for sure because I have never seen one for real.

http://www.fumotovalve.com/

 

hmm, that's what I thought it would do, but when I flipped the little switch, there was no oil comming out. I'll whipe it down to see if it's a ball valve gate valve.
do you know if these go bad from time to time?

thanks for the link!

 

I have never seen one of those, anyways good thing to make sure that that is the oil pan. When I was 12 my dad had me changing the oil on his vehicles. He got a new F250 Super Duty and had me change the oil. I drained the tranny fluid instead and filled the engine with an extra 6 qt. of oil. Yes it took it all. Needless to say the tranny froze on him on his way to work. Amazingly Ford paid for it all.

 

haha that's funny.

well I cleaned it up and noticed that it was infact a ball valve. opened up the valve and jacked the car up to put more head pressure on the drain. it will only drip out about 1 1/2 drips a second.

Since dripping oil is not normal when the plug is first removed I figured something was strange. I pull the dipstic to check the lever (valve closed) and there is nothing registered on the dipstick!

I might mention that I have not changed the oil since at least June when I bought the truck, that was almost 15,000 miles ago, over half of which was pulling a trailer

Definetly not the best thing for the motor, but hey I want to put a 5.0 in anyways, so maybe this can help me speed up the project.

maybe I'll be a little nicer to the 3.slow since I have tortured it for the last 6 months, gotta say though my bmw sure would not have put up with that kind of abuse

 

I have one of those on mine. It helps to have warm or hot engine oil before draining, the hole is a mere ¼" or so. Mine has a hose nipple on it though, allows me to run a length of 3/8" hose right into a jug, no drain pan needed. I just warm up the engine then let it drain for a few hours while I drink beer

 

from the looks of it, those missing quarts of oil is on the engine... you have an oil leak somewhere..... and should remedy that problem... if the engine hasnt seized yet, consider yourself lucky and just baby it now..... keep up on the maintenance... nothing should ever have 15k put on it without at least checking the fluids.... that mentalitity is just unsafe in general... hope your brake and steering systems dont cuase you to have an accident and possibly kill someone.....

trucks in the hands of morons is bad!

 

Poor truck you should sell it to someone who will take care of it.