bullseye

This actually makes Ford owners buy the Motorcraft oil at $4 something a quart to protect their warranty.

I bought Motorcraft at the local Wal Mart for like $1.52 a quart for the last few oil changes. Although it seems they are no longer carrying it. The highest I had ever seen it at Wal Mart was like $1.76 per quart.

Yeah there might be better oils but my Civic at 112,500 miles seems to run as good as it ever has so I am not sweating the fact that I have used a lot of Motorcraft for my oil changes.

Jrfish007

iTrader: (3)

Yeah, I'm not saying it's bad for your civic, just wondering why you used it, but at 1.52 that isn't to bad. But now that I have to use it, I have found that the only place to buy it as at the dealer, and everything is twice as much at the dealer. But my dad's Accord put 230+k on it on normal Valvoline, the cheap stuff with out a problem.

etdigitalis

err?
by reading this i am getting dumber.
thanks.

S2000man01

iTrader: (1)

ok? care to enlighten us all?

etdigitalis

sorry guys, didn't mean to make waves...

i was referring to the earlier exchanges between Jrfish007 and Flashlightboy regarding the use of synthetic oil. most importantly the part about not to "waste money treating your car like it's a performance engine because you wont help it" by using synthetic oils.

S2000man01, you're a smart guy... i've read through many of your posts and oftentimes when there is question you'll support it with a link... but i just love it when folks go back and forth spouting jibber-jabber trying to pass it off as good advice or even fact.

here's some good reading:

http://www.firstfives.org/faq/oil/oilartcl.html
http://www.smartsynthetics.com/artic...nt_quality.htm
http://www.csaa.com/global/faqdetail...57C220,00.html

personally, i stand behind Mobil-1 5w-20 even though my EM2 doesn't have a high-performance engine
just my $.02

S2000man01

iTrader: (1)

ok. lol. you should clarify next time you are making "waves" in a particular thread. didn't give us much to go on.


i'm going to go read your links now.

Jrfish007

iTrader: (3)

Here is just a sample of what I've read:

Engine Oils and Automotive Lubrication (Mechanical Engineering (Marcell Dekker))

Chevron Delo[R] 400 Multigrade, Chevron RPM[R], Texaco Ursa[R] Premium TDX and Ursa[R] Super Plus meet new Detroit Diesel engine oil specification.(Industry News) : An article from: Fleet Equipment

Why does engine oil pressure vary? (The Answer Column).(Column) : An article from: Fleet Equipment

Engine Oil Effects on Vehicle Fuel Economy: (Selected Papers Through 2001 (Progress in Technology)

The first is a book, the other two are published articles. The difference between these and two of the sites you quoted is a list of websites are obviously biased towards using synthetic oils. Don't get me wrong, what you qouted isn't bad, just biased and there is alot of good info in there. For intstance, synthetic oil was created for jet engines that have high temps and RPMS above 60,000, sound like something I need in my car.

I'm a chemical engineer, we design motor oils, we design the plant to make the oil and gas, we run tests on oil, Chemical Engineers do EVERYTHING dealing with oil, I think I know a little bit about oil. I've taken class specifically on motor oils, had class tests on oils and all the parfins found in oils.

So when it comes down to it, you can use what ever oil you want, one will not give you "better" protection than the other, synthetics can go longer before breaking down, that's about it. You should use caution in buying any oil, there are cheap dino oils and cheap synthetic that won't protect your car that well. A good dino oil is better than a cheap synthetic. So, the question comes to this, how much do you drive? If you only drive say 10k a year, I would not recommend going 10k between oil changes, so why spend money on an oil that can go 10k? Just doesn't make sense. If you drive say 30k a year, then yeah, a 10k oil change makes sense, that's 3 oils changes a year, about 4 months between an oil change compared to dino oil that can really only go about 5k between changes. I still feel better going only 5k between oil changes though because I use high sulfur gas, which changes the pH of oil over time, hence kill anything rubber and makes oil loose it's high temperature viscosity, hence become "thincker" and not as good of a lubricant.

etdigitalis

From a chemical engineers standpoint, if you were to use a synthetic oil that can last beyond 10k mi and you drive only 10k mi/yr, then why do you not recommend going 10k mi between oil changes?

Not that this applies to anyone, but my 2001 Civic Owner's Manual suggests a 10k mi maintenance interval for oil changes under normal driving conditions... and a 5k mi interval for severe. With this in mind, a synthetic would surely fit the bill and perhaps extend the severe interval to 10k mi.

If that's true than maybe you should consider using something other than a petroleum-based oil

the old castrol syntec commercial comes to mind
no "rubber" = less hi-temp viscosity breakdown

Jrfish007

iTrader: (3)

lol, rubber is loose term, there are over a hundered types of rubber. Here is the short version though, 15-20 years ago there was a huge difference between synthetic and dino oils. Reason is because dino oils where manufactured in a certian way that was ineffecient in seperating things like parfins from motor oil. However, technology has advanced, and process like hydrocracking have reduced the amount of contaminates in dino oils compared to 10 years ago, so a GOOD dino oil can protect just as good and almost as long (given the proper addatives are in it) as a middle grade synthetic oil.

Well, the thing about sulfur applies to any oil, dino or synthetic. Sulfur make what we call SOx and there is also a side product called NOx, when these get into the oil (via engine blow-by), they break the oil down, and it's time based more so than milage. So once most oils get this stuff into the system, they have a certian life span. In general synthetic last longer than dino oils in this respect, but agian that change for different grades of oil.

So, keeping that in mind, notice that I live in Ohio, most people don't know that Ohio actually gets crappy gas (high octane, but high sulfur content), we also have one the highest contents of sulfur oxides in the air than any other state (Ohio is one the nations leaders in coal fired power plants) so I also bring Sulfur in through the air. So this means I intorduce more sulfur into my oil than most people, so there is no way I would go one year on the same oil becasue synthetic oil breaks down after about 9-10 months here and dino after about 7-8 months (I've actually done the testing myself in my lab with a Mass Spectromiter) Now if you want to go 1 year and only drive about 10k a year, and don't live in Ohio, I would recommend getting your oils composition checked. There are kits you can buy to see how much more life your oil has.

This means oil life depends on the region you live in. If you live in Ohio, bad idea to keep your oil for a year, if you live in say Florida, you may be able to go 10k and one year easily. I have gone 10k in one year on Royal Purple, and tested it, the oil turned out to be okay after that time, but I stopped using it becasue the price went from $4.50 per quart to $6, which no longer made it ecconomical for me considering I can buy a decent dino oil for almost a third of that and change it twice as often.

Now keep in mind that you should not run your oil to limit, if these kits say you can go anouther 5k, don't go exaclty anouther 5k, change it in about 4.5k. In engineering, we like to keep a saftey factor of 10% to the limit. So if you know by testing that oil can last you exactly 10k and one year, change it every 9k and about every 11 months. You could get a high sulfur tank of gas and easily shorten the life of you oil. Sorry to drag on, but this basically summerizes what I've said in a bunch of posts into a single post.

In the end, you can use what ever oil you want and change it how ever often you want, but I think if you want to go long intervals, you need to do reasearch and find out the limit before accidently taking it to far and use a top end synthetic like Mobil-1 or Royal Purple just to name a couple.