from the ‘motomonkey’ dept:
I don’t know if you’re like me, but I’m messy. Oil changes exacerbate the problem. So as one who’s tired of waiting for oil to burn off of the headers, and cleaning up spill from my garage floor, I tried something new. For starters I put my rags down first under my oil collector. This is common sense, but I have little enough of that. 
The new part, though, came in a flash of insight — cover the headers to protect them from erl when removing the filter!
But how? I decided on aluminum foil. I wrapped them loosely and left a lip at the low end, to drive any flowing oil down into the collector. When the filter came off, the oil indeed channeled down into the pan. Sweet! And since I let is sit to drain for a while, there was no spilling when I removed the foil later. Nice!
No mess. And if I was feeling really green I guess I could save the foil to wrap up dinner.
