Hoss6.9
V - "The BOSS"
I am still using mystic oil....
Oil Thread...Again
- Thread starter HammerDown
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Blind Driver2
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PwrSmoke
Full Access Member
What about those of us using WMO as fuel?
You're on your own!
Come think about it, what do you do? Tell us. Ever had oil analysis done?
That's all I have used in the 3 1/2 years I have owned the truck (187,000 total miles, 37,000 since I purchased the truck). Once I fixed the valve cover gasket leak I burn about 2 qts every oil change (4-5,000 miles?).
Around here I get the best price on Delo 400 compared to other brands and Walmart is lowest on the Delo.
idiabuse
Full Access Member
I still use AMSOIL in everything I own. Still cheaper to me than doing oil changes with store bought oil and cheap filters. The newer CJ4 oils are not as good as the older blends for diesels, but generally you wont really notice. Most just drain and replace, Monkey see Monkey DO! Research shows that the use of high efficency oil filters by the federal GOV extends oil changes up to 4X longer with conventional oil. Research Has shown that Better quality oils last longer under severe temperatures than conventional oil.
Research in 1945 in combat equiptment from the UK and the USA, was shown that the use of siezed synthetic oil from the germans used in aviation engines showed much less varnish and deposits and much easier starting in sub zero temperatures.
The info is available of the many advantages of synthetic oils over conventional including the huge advantage of increased miles driven on one gallon of fuel.
I will never purchase conventional oil because it just cost too much to use.
Javier
Research in 1945 in combat equiptment from the UK and the USA, was shown that the use of siezed synthetic oil from the germans used in aviation engines showed much less varnish and deposits and much easier starting in sub zero temperatures.
The info is available of the many advantages of synthetic oils over conventional including the huge advantage of increased miles driven on one gallon of fuel.
I will never purchase conventional oil because it just cost too much to use.
Javier
gdhillon
Full Access Member
I just checked my rotella jug and I say cI4...its synthetic 5w40 if that makes a difference
Dave 001
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Not looking for an argument but I disagree........ I think the Germans were using castor oil which proved much better than what the Allies were using.
Dave
asmith
Full Access Member
you are the one that went 47,000 miles without changing your oil, right? how long have you gone since the rebuild? when you went to synthetic did you have leaks. that is another thing i am not sure about. i hear switching after all this time on dino that the seals dont like synthetics.
In regards to the seals what happens in the rare case that switching causes leaks is that the seal was already leaking but all the sludge and deposits left by the dino oil was sealing it instead, the synthetic oil cleaned that all up so now the seal is leaking.
idiabuse
Full Access Member
No need to disagree, unless you disagree that synthetic oil of today did not come from the research of the Germans during world war two. I would find that hard to disagree on.
Javier
PwrSmoke
Full Access Member
Most of the things you read about a PAO/ester synthetic like Amsoil, and to a varying degree the other base oils also labelled "synthetic," are true. The oil is "better" in an objective sense. Yes, it's very much overhyped and that tends to make one a bit more skeptical. It's also true that it isn't optimal for every engine or situation. Nor does it make financial sense for every, perhaps even many, operators. To my logical mind, there are two good reasons to seek out a high dollar PAO/ester synthetic:
1) You need the extra performance a syn offers in a difficult operating environment (extremes of heat, cold or hard work);
2) You want a long change interval.
I'll leave Item 1 for the operator to decide based on the situation. In truth, not many people have the kind of operational environment that requires a high dollar oil.
As to Item 2, my opinion is that a high dollar synthetic ONLY makes financial sense if you run it out LONG like IDIabuse does. To do that, you need a very efficient filtration system (which adds substantially to the already high financial cost) because no matter how good the oil might be, the engine and the oil can fail due to contamination buildup. Plus, contamination increases the oxidation rate of the oil. The only way to get a return on the investment (ROI) is to run a very long interval. Which is usually possible but it requires care and knowledge to avoid problems. You can calculate the ROI for yourself. It usually makes the most sense for people who crank on lots of miles in a short period. Since Amsoil only rates a one year time interval, if you can't make an ROI within that year, it doesn't make financial sense. I know for a fact that that one year interval is a CYA and that longer, much longer, time intervals are possible in the right circumstances. Amsoil does the year interval, I think, because some people short hop and that's hell on an oil. One of PAO syn's worst features is it's ability to deal with moisture buildup... something that happens to a short hopper that never really gets fully warmed up. Oil doesn't degrade much sitting when it's been left in a clean, dry state. If the engine is run long enough to bake out moisture and, filtered well, it can last a very long time in the sump. How long? Don't know. I know that I run some of my equipment out three years to get to the hourly change interval and the oil has tested just great. FYI, it's a conventional 10W30 or 15W40 Rotella T oil.
Another FYI about PAO is that it doesn't carry additives well so they need a percentage of Grp II or III conventional as carrier oil. How much depends on what type and how many additives they need for the blend... 5-15 percent is common. Some people tout the fact that PAOs don't NEED as many additives as a conventional oil... especially thing like VIIs (Viscosity index Improvers), PPDs (Pour Point Depressants), FMs (Friction Modifiers), etc. It's a plus but one that sometiems works against you. They still need to carry detergents, antioxidants, a certain amount of antiwear additives. These additives, and their carrier oil DO wear out and that's a danger. In a long run, however, you change the filters and therefore need to add some oil. This is usually enough to replenish the additive pack.
Again, to my logical mind, a high dollar synthetic makes the most sense of a new or newish engine. Some people put it in a tired engine that's 2/3s worn out and expect it to revitalize the engine. It might to a degree but the cleaning it gets is a two edged sword. It will break loose decades of crud and if you have a seal on the ragged edge of leakage, it will soon begin to leak. Beyond some genuine issues due to formulations being incompatible with the seal materials of the '70s (neoprene, IIRC it was mostly with Mobil 1), that's the source of the "syn made my truck leak" myth. You can get leaks today with a syn but the seal that leaked was already a zombie. The oil just cleaned out the crud that was slowing the leak (there are also some chemical reactions that can occur on an old, dried up seal). On the other had, the new oil could loosen rings gummed into ring lands, etc. and make the engine run a little better. On the bad side, some problems have been noted when people put syn into a dirty engine. All that sludge, soot agglomeration and oxidation residue comes loose, maybe plugs the filter or some small orifice and... bad day at black rock. Doesn't happen often but..?
And finally, oil consumption. If your old IDI engine uses a quart every 1500... that's a 10 dollar quart every 1500 miles, or whatever interval your engine drinks oil. Top dollar syns can't put metal back on worn parts, revitalize valve guides, or put material back on valve stem seals, so oil usage likely won't change much. On the good side, adding fresh oil regularly does sweeten up the additive package, so the engine will like it even if your wallet doesn't.
I have crunched the numbers for myself and high dollar syns don't pass financial muster for me. I have two cases of Royal Purple 15W40 from a test a few years back and as soon as my 6.9 is broken in, I will likely use that up in place of my normal 10W30 RT T5. Since I have a 3 micron bypass system, I intend to run a long interval. How long TBD. I will do a sample at 6K and go from there, sampling regularly. If my engine uses enough oil to run me out before I reach a condemnation point based on UOA, I will switch back to conventional.
FYI, I am getting 10K OCIs on conventional or semi-syn (the "syn"part being a Grp III at 10-20 percent) in two of my gassers.. one with a bypass (which may go MUCH father than 10K... we'll see) and the other with nothing more than a higher efficiency and high capacity filter.
Are you waiting for me to come down on one side or the other? I won't. Once size DOESN'T fit all and you can't generalize that one way is bad and the other is good... or vice versa. Syn works great for some. Conventional works great for many and syn is an unjustifiable expense. Syn is truly as good as they say it is but it's not for every situation. Oil choice shouldn't be based on Brand Loyalty, thinking that some high dollar oil makes you a better person somehow, or on some single single aspect of a particular oil formulation. Base it on an evaluation of the individual circumstances involved, the costs and review of the available products.
1) You need the extra performance a syn offers in a difficult operating environment (extremes of heat, cold or hard work);
2) You want a long change interval.
I'll leave Item 1 for the operator to decide based on the situation. In truth, not many people have the kind of operational environment that requires a high dollar oil.
As to Item 2, my opinion is that a high dollar synthetic ONLY makes financial sense if you run it out LONG like IDIabuse does. To do that, you need a very efficient filtration system (which adds substantially to the already high financial cost) because no matter how good the oil might be, the engine and the oil can fail due to contamination buildup. Plus, contamination increases the oxidation rate of the oil. The only way to get a return on the investment (ROI) is to run a very long interval. Which is usually possible but it requires care and knowledge to avoid problems. You can calculate the ROI for yourself. It usually makes the most sense for people who crank on lots of miles in a short period. Since Amsoil only rates a one year time interval, if you can't make an ROI within that year, it doesn't make financial sense. I know for a fact that that one year interval is a CYA and that longer, much longer, time intervals are possible in the right circumstances. Amsoil does the year interval, I think, because some people short hop and that's hell on an oil. One of PAO syn's worst features is it's ability to deal with moisture buildup... something that happens to a short hopper that never really gets fully warmed up. Oil doesn't degrade much sitting when it's been left in a clean, dry state. If the engine is run long enough to bake out moisture and, filtered well, it can last a very long time in the sump. How long? Don't know. I know that I run some of my equipment out three years to get to the hourly change interval and the oil has tested just great. FYI, it's a conventional 10W30 or 15W40 Rotella T oil.
Another FYI about PAO is that it doesn't carry additives well so they need a percentage of Grp II or III conventional as carrier oil. How much depends on what type and how many additives they need for the blend... 5-15 percent is common. Some people tout the fact that PAOs don't NEED as many additives as a conventional oil... especially thing like VIIs (Viscosity index Improvers), PPDs (Pour Point Depressants), FMs (Friction Modifiers), etc. It's a plus but one that sometiems works against you. They still need to carry detergents, antioxidants, a certain amount of antiwear additives. These additives, and their carrier oil DO wear out and that's a danger. In a long run, however, you change the filters and therefore need to add some oil. This is usually enough to replenish the additive pack.
Again, to my logical mind, a high dollar synthetic makes the most sense of a new or newish engine. Some people put it in a tired engine that's 2/3s worn out and expect it to revitalize the engine. It might to a degree but the cleaning it gets is a two edged sword. It will break loose decades of crud and if you have a seal on the ragged edge of leakage, it will soon begin to leak. Beyond some genuine issues due to formulations being incompatible with the seal materials of the '70s (neoprene, IIRC it was mostly with Mobil 1), that's the source of the "syn made my truck leak" myth. You can get leaks today with a syn but the seal that leaked was already a zombie. The oil just cleaned out the crud that was slowing the leak (there are also some chemical reactions that can occur on an old, dried up seal). On the other had, the new oil could loosen rings gummed into ring lands, etc. and make the engine run a little better. On the bad side, some problems have been noted when people put syn into a dirty engine. All that sludge, soot agglomeration and oxidation residue comes loose, maybe plugs the filter or some small orifice and... bad day at black rock. Doesn't happen often but..?
And finally, oil consumption. If your old IDI engine uses a quart every 1500... that's a 10 dollar quart every 1500 miles, or whatever interval your engine drinks oil. Top dollar syns can't put metal back on worn parts, revitalize valve guides, or put material back on valve stem seals, so oil usage likely won't change much. On the good side, adding fresh oil regularly does sweeten up the additive package, so the engine will like it even if your wallet doesn't.
I have crunched the numbers for myself and high dollar syns don't pass financial muster for me. I have two cases of Royal Purple 15W40 from a test a few years back and as soon as my 6.9 is broken in, I will likely use that up in place of my normal 10W30 RT T5. Since I have a 3 micron bypass system, I intend to run a long interval. How long TBD. I will do a sample at 6K and go from there, sampling regularly. If my engine uses enough oil to run me out before I reach a condemnation point based on UOA, I will switch back to conventional.
FYI, I am getting 10K OCIs on conventional or semi-syn (the "syn"part being a Grp III at 10-20 percent) in two of my gassers.. one with a bypass (which may go MUCH father than 10K... we'll see) and the other with nothing more than a higher efficiency and high capacity filter.
Are you waiting for me to come down on one side or the other? I won't. Once size DOESN'T fit all and you can't generalize that one way is bad and the other is good... or vice versa. Syn works great for some. Conventional works great for many and syn is an unjustifiable expense. Syn is truly as good as they say it is but it's not for every situation. Oil choice shouldn't be based on Brand Loyalty, thinking that some high dollar oil makes you a better person somehow, or on some single single aspect of a particular oil formulation. Base it on an evaluation of the individual circumstances involved, the costs and review of the available products.
Yes, but now aviation engines have mandatory rebuilds scheduled. No doubt the need for that high quality oil may have slacked off a bit. The last 757 I was sitting in, I watched the guy bring around a drum of Valvoline something or another and pumped it in.
I was wondering about what aircraft engines use myself, til I found this. An excerpt from aircraft MIL spec lubrication.
Do not use gas turbine oils in any internal combustion engine!
There is very little similarity between this gas turbine application and the lubrication requirements of a typical internal combustion engine. Jet turbine oils aren't exposed to the byproducts of combustion. They are primarily designed for excellent, extreme temp viscometric performance with thermal and oxidative stability. Gas turbines have no blow-by and virtually no highly loaded areas. Gas turbine oils are very thin, have no detergents or dispersants, and act more like a coolant than a lubricant.
idiabuse
Full Access Member
Oil thread again
great call on the debate! the more time that passes lately, the price of conventional oil keeps rising, making the price of Synthetic more attractive.
Can we agree on that?
Javier
great call on the debate! the more time that passes lately, the price of conventional oil keeps rising, making the price of Synthetic more attractive.
Can we agree on that?
Javier
idiabuse
Full Access Member
Other than the stated differences in turbine and combustion engines wich lubricant is needed in both the sump temperatures in turbine engines run about 100 F hotter than combustion automotive engines.
Most important quality of turbine oil is the ability to handle both extreme heat and cold temps during service life.
With the advancements in refining conventional oils in the last 20 years the performance of conventional and synthetics has shrunk so yes cheaper oils are being used on turbine engines with more change intervals planned for units in service. My buddy works at MIA International as a Aircraft Mech super and they still use BP synthetic turbine oil in all the turbines.
Javier
PwrSmoke
Full Access Member
Well maybe, except that as conventional goes up, so does syn and the price gap, and all the ROA arguments, remain largely the same.
With a little care, just about any oil can be run longer than many people do.
It's stuck in people's head that they are doing their truck a big favor by changing the oil at some early, arbitrarily low mileage. In reality, they are often just wasting money and resources. If that isn't a good enough argument, here's another: They may actually be doing some harm by oil changes too often. After running a while, the various anti wear additives (ZDDP for example) build up microscopic "layers" on the working surfaces to protect them from those moments of contact when the hydrodynamic barrier breaks down or isn't there (startup, for example). When you change the oil, the new oil cleans off those layers and puts on different ones. In between the cleaning of the old and the putting on of the new, the engine is a little more vulnerable to wear. It's cumulative and small but there.
You have two options as to OCI, the factory recommendation and UOA (Used oil analysis). The old factory recommendations are no longer valid because they were based on the oil and fuel of the day. Big improvements in both since the '80s and '90s. My opinion is that you can take the "long" OCi of yesterday and make that the standard for today, with longer runs possible. Shorter as dictated by UOA, operational concerns or environment. There are many caveats. An old, tired, out-of-tune engine fills it self with soot more quickly and dilutes the oil with fuel faster than a fresher engine, so it might need a sooner change. A nice tight engine, lightly used, could go longer. I think many on the board use 5K and that's about right on conventional. In my own UOAs, I never had trouble with fuel dilution but soot didn't start to get "up there" until about 6K. Two percent soot is my upper limit, but some sources I've seen show the IDI Ford/IH as good to 3-4 percent. I could probably go 8K before I reached 4 percent soot. My Farmall, with 8300 hours on it, took 3 years and 120 hours to reach 3 percent soot.. and that old boy is tired!
Anyway, it's different for everyone but you can't really say with authority that an arbitrary OCI is good or bad without testing. Of course, without testing you want to err on side of caution.. which may mean dumping oil that still has 2000 miles left in it. Thisis where UOA has proven a valuable tool for me. I don't test every oil change. I sample several time until I've reached a good place and don't sample again until I make a major change of some kind. Different oil, different operating cycle, etc.
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