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Maintenance & Repair Synthetic motor oil
8536 messages, Last post on Nov 21, 2009 at 9:34 AM
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Replying to: coldcranker (Mar 14, 2009 8:47 am)  . Sandman, I use Castol 5w20 conventional in my Accord, the same oil recommended for your Civic. I only have 30K miles so far and it takes the Minder ~7K miles to reach 15%, which has been my OCI. My commute is 13 miles one way, mostly highway. I did a UOA of the first factory oil with stellar results (changed at ~6300 miles). I posted the analysis on the Accord board 2 years ago. I can try and dig it up if you're interested. However, the Honda factory filled oil is specially formulated and likely does not represent the Castrol 5w20 I'm using now. |
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My minder says 30% and I just hit 20k miles this morning on the way to work. Was planning to get the oil changes on Friday morning at my local dealer but I'm thinking maybe I should wait till I get to 15%. Is this logical or should I just get 'er done now. Still toying with the idea of swapping the synthetic blend for synthetic. Shipo thinks I should, but Ruking thinks I'm fine with the synthetic blend. As stated earlier, I only drive about 20 miles a day to work on a 6 lane city street with about 25 stop lights which takes about 18 minutes at 6 a m but about 25 minutes coming home at 4 p m. I really hate to waste the $ if the synthetic blend will do the same job as the regular synthetic as my oil minder doesn't know the difference in oil product anyways. I want to protect my engine 1st off but I've always used regular dino and now synthetic blend on all my cars with never any oil issues that I'm aware of. This had led to my confusion ans I have 1 vote for each side now from the experts in this forum. Maybe you could weigh in also about which choice will be best for my Civic. This car I plan to keep for at least another 5 or so years, G-d willing.  The Sandman 
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Replying to: sandman_6472 (Mar 17, 2009 1:04 pm) Since you drive so few miles, there's no point going synthetic IMHO. |
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Replying to: ruking1 (Mar 16, 2009 9:46 am) Ruking1, Where can I buy XOM superflo 5w20 for .65 a qt? I have trouble finding any oil for 2.00 a qt.
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Replying to: richardson (Mar 17, 2009 6:49 pm)  6.27-6.50 per quart, the last I saw at WalMart. I am guessing this is the part in the endless oil prices cycle, where the refiner is scheduled to make some money with lower per barrel costs.
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Replying to: coldcranker (Feb 05, 2009 10:41 pm) and Quaker State Asks for a Showdown Synthetic Oil Challenge Should be interesting how this shapes up, since the Sequence IVA test runs an engine for many hours and measures how much cam lobe metal has been lost due to wear. A good synthetic should minimize that wear.
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Replying to: coldcranker (Mar 27, 2009 3:36 pm) Those "many" hours 40-50 mph really only amount to a/an 3000-4000 miles oil change !! Again, another reason to change oil less often. Being as how I normally run 15,000 to 25,000 miles, that is only 26% to 12% of the useful oil life for me. normally I would be more interested in the 3000 to 25,000 miles portions. Indeed it is well known to Castrol (others also,-see previous post) the faster wear is/has been WITH new oil. So if Castrol is recommending frequent oil changes; defacto: it intimately knows about faster wear!!?? Indeed it has for literally decades if not generations been FOR FASTER wear. (defacto, as a result of recommending frequent oil changes) As a result, the marketing scenario is HOLLOW. Further it is good that Castrol, QS and Pennsoil, etc. are getting into current technologies !!! The 0w20/5w20 Ford/Honda specifications really upped the standards !!!! ALL other of those vendors' past products were known sludge enablers !!! So for example it will take me personally about 10 years of good results to reverse witness to app 53 years of crappy performance. (I started very young looking at innards of engines) UOA's (real world users like YOU and people who actually use oil) show Castrol products to be good performers, but Mobil One products consistently show the LEAST wear and LONGEST durability. Perhaps Castrol's Edge product will be the one lone competitor to rejuvenate Castrol's line (BP owns Castrol) . My take is competition is good !!! However the price is WAY out of line. Being as how Castrol Edge has a GM 4178 M product (Corvette engines) which has a oem recommendation of 15,000 miles, I think you really need to rethink the term "extended" oil change. As you can see in the above case, 15,000 miles is the "normal" OCI.
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Replying to: ruking1 (Mar 28, 2009 8:04 am) I disagree with your assertion that Mobil 1 has always done well in UOA (user oil analysis), as bobistheoilguy.com forums has seen a lot of people complain about excessive iron (Fe) wear using Mobil 1 for a long time. At one point recently, I saw a list somebody had of about 100 or so UOA results showing the Fe wear figure, and Mobil 1 tended to have the worst wear of any of the oils there, including conventional oils on the list. (There are so many variables in any one UOA, but if you have a lot of them, across many cars, and you see Mobil 1 almost always having excessive wear, then that is probably a trend result.) As a mechanical engineer myself, I can tell you the Sequence IVA is a real test that measures real metal loss on a real cam lobe. It is an indicator of wear performance in semi-hydrodynamic and fully non-hydrodynamic points inside an engine, such as occurs during engine-startup, engine lugging, on cam lobes and rings, and on journal bearings in transient conditions. Your argument about how many miles a Sequence IVA test represents doesn't make sense, since an oil that fails that test means it will just get worse the longer you leave the failed oil in there. Indeed, the wear charts I've seen has shown Mobil 1 can't retain its ZDDP long enough to prevent high wear rates over any period of time as the oil ages. An oil that hangs in there (with active ZDDP) will keep wear down better over a long period of time. |
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Replying to: coldcranker (Mar 28, 2009 10:17 am) I am not sure how you read the results, but your marketing take is NOT how I read them. But YOU were the one that stated (that I think) Mobil One ALWAYS is better, ...clearly, I did NOT say that. But YOU clearly did. For the record you are incorrect.  But I am perfectly fine with how YOU chose to read it for YOU. Again the reason for UOA's is to see on a more technical basis, if the real world lives up to the marketing hype (anybody's). Again, I just went through selection process for a VW 507.00 specification oil. The Castrol product was even given marketing support by VWA. In the UOA department (for my .02 cents where the rubber meets the road so to speak) the Castrol product VW 507.00 was bested by Total Quartz and Mobil One product.(among others actually) I chose the Total Quartz because of lack of availability of the Mobil One product. I am also awaiting more UOA's. As you probably are aware Castrol 507.00 is sold at VW parts counters and other specialty vendors (gold bottle), but the oem factory fill 2009 MY TDI is actually Total Quartz VW 507.00. Marketing, as you probably gathered is probably more important than we think. Being as how you probably belong to a professional organization like SAE, perhaps you should publish a "marketing wars" experiment!!?? I look forward to your published results. But so other folks do not fret, one does not have to be a mechanic engineer to make the best oil selections (for the levels they wish to plug into).
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Replying to: ruking1 (Mar 28, 2009 10:23 am) Wrong. They consistently show the worst wear, as seen for years in many, many UOAs. That correlates with why Mobil1 is known to fail Sequence IVA.
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