Gonna swap the OP gasket out, and just wanna know if I can just unplug the sensor and drop the pan oput the bottm or do I actually gotta remover a bunch of crap?

Loosen the sensor.

Sweet......Any special tools or just the standard magical 10mm socket?

No special tools needed. Just be careful of the sensor

I was just under my '99 yesterday checking it out for an oil pan swap. I hit a rock on the freeway and put about a half-quart dent in it.

If it'* like mine, there are 18 bolts around the edge. Two you can't see without removing a plastic cover on the rear (transmission end) of the engine. then it will drop right off with no obstructions.

Also, the oil pan bolts are metric but have a 3/8" hex head (sae) bolt head. WTF?

Next, wait til you see what the oil pan gasket costs! $50! So make sure you slop it up good with blue goo so you don't have to do the job again.

Good luck, and please be sure to post in this thread when the job'* done and tell us how it went.

Where the hell did you buy your gasket? I paid 15 bucks for mine....or somthing like that.....Or I could get the 32 kit which wasn't worth anything more or less than the 15 gaskets I got.....No 50 dollars. Either way, thanks for the run down Bob, and I'm prolly gonna do this next weekend even though I just changed the oil, it'll prolly be better for the engine to change it soon and get a lot of the old oil out. Also I'll be sure to take lots of pics and document everything for the inquiring minds around here

Now that I think about it, is there anything that I should do as a preventive maintanance if I'm gonna have access to the lower end right there?

On my 93 SSEi, I had to undo one of the oil cooler lines to get to one bolt...the one on the very tip of the oil pan, right in front of the harmonic balancer. If you have that cooler, there is no other way around getting that bolt out w/ exception of taking off the harmonic balancer...something that should not be done unless absolutely needed. And I want to say it was a 20 mil wrench.

When I dropped mine, all I did was unplug the oil level sensor. I didn't see any reason to remove the sensor.