Charles Navarro

Sorry to say, but this is a real problem. Oil companies have their own motivations for the products they come out with. I have in writing from the API's development of the SL and SM standards stating that they do not need to test for backwards compatibility of new oils with older engines no longer produced and have clearly ignored previous well documented issues from other SAE journals about the ills of reducing Zn and P and older engines.

I will scan and post hopefully tomorrow the UOA's from our field testing of Castrol GTX, Brad Penn, Royal Purple Max Cycle, and Mobil 1 V-Twin - all from the same engine on a cross-country drive, with oil changes and complete drain of all oil, along with a filter change. GTX was the worst, Brad Penn was the best, at least for wear indicators. Fuel economy and horsepower in controlled dyno testing is a completely different story. Unfortuneately, I did not know of the Swepco product when we did this testing, well over a year and a half ago.

I also put the Brad Penn in before driving to Rennlist, and put on a good 2400 mi in two days, all at very high speeds/rpms, with stops only for gas. I have ordered more sampling bottles and will pull a sample for testing, which I too will share. My big problem is trying to get enough mileage in to do enough testing on the oils. It's just hard to do, not to mention expensive when you start adding up oil and testing.

The problem with lab testing is the accuracy of the lab used. I had been sending in controls (samples from a known bottle previously sampled) with every batch of tests. Staveley was always spot on, who I used for testing most, if not all the products. My experience with some of the other labs was not as favorable.

Peter Zimmermann

Back in the '80s and '90s when my shop took an engine apart it was immediately apparent what oil was used. Castrol and Pennzoil engines required three days in the hot tank, then hand-cleaning until things were acceptable for assembly. Kendall, Valvoline and Quaker State engines, on the other hand, needed nothing more than a quick dunk in the tank, and some brushing with Safety-Kleen. The Castrol engines in particular had amazing build up of crud on the rings and ring grooves, actual deposits stuck to the sides of connecting rods, and a much higher chance of cam lobe pitting/rocker arm wear, than other engines that had experienced a similar life. (An interesting aside; Pennzoil had something in the oil that caused rubber crank breather hoses and similar to prematurely rot). Kendall engines had almost perfect pistons/rings; we overhauled a '79 SC, for a long-time customer, at 190,000 miles and the pistons/cylinders still measured in spec! At the time there was plenty of evidence to not use anything but Kendall, and that's exactly what we did. The reason that I bring this up is that I don't believe that Leopards change their spots, so I will never use Castrol. Kendall, on the other hand, sold the company and probably had no control regarding the direction the new owner took their products. Then Brad Penn shows up, and produces an oil that smells and looks exactly as the "old" Kendall GT-1 did, and that's what is going into my car.

HarryD

Peter,

Thanks for some "inside" knowledge. I always wondered why I heard many mechanics say that they can always tell if an engine used Castrol. Now I know.

From my unscientific standpoint, I always noticed that Castrol had a smell vaguely like candle wax. I wonder if these waxes in Castrol formed the hard to clean gunk you report.

Anyway, I digress. Back to our regular programming....

HarryD

Iconoclast.. I think not. I do not think any of the products are "sacrosanct".

IMHO, will you have not short term problems with Chevron, Valvoline All climate, Joe's discount oil or any of the hundreds of brands out there.

In truth, it's "Your engine, your choice". The problem will not be apparent in a few months or possibly even in a few years of use. But when it comes, it can be very expensive to have made the wrong choice.

Me, on the other hand, will tend to listen to folks who have taken hundreds of these engines apart and observed what wears and what does not. How many engines have you looked at?

Mike Murphy

Which brings us full circle for the most important oil decision you can make: to change your oil regularly. I think even if you use crappy oil and change it often, you might be OK.

Jay Gratton

I love oil discussions! Lots of good information.

Peter Zimmermann

Harry: I agree, I don't think that anyone on this board has declared Brad Penn, or anything else, to be sacred. Perhaps they've been, deservedly, placed on a small pedestal, and that's OK. I think that it's also OK to assume that the biggest companies, with the highly-paid engineers, might know their stuff - but do they care about a few hundred older cars that might lose camshafts if their brilliantly executed modern products are not capable of protecting a flat tappet? Probably not, and thankfully this board has some very knowledgeable people to help sort it all out. As has been stated, modern oils are designed to prevent catalytic converters from failing before their warranty expires. So be it. It's clearly up to people like those on this board to be sure that we do the right things for the engines in our special little cars, because I doubt that Shell, Mobil, BP,etc. give a damn.

Murphy: More frequent changes do help, especially with oils (Castrol & Pennzoil) like I mentioned in the above post. If there was any detergent in those oils, when changed at factory recommended intervals, it was no longer working when the oil was drained. I think that our first clue to how badly they performed was during a simple oil change. You're standing under the car watching the oil drain from the engine, and realize that it's clean. The first inclination is to think that the oil must be really special, after all, if the oil's that clean the inside of the engine must be just as good, maybe better. And then you do a Kendall engine, and the oil comes out almost black. Hmmmmm. There might be something to this. We took down a large number of crankcase sump plates and looked inside, only to discover that the engines with clean oil were really grungy, and the engines with dirty oil sparkled. At that point we began to record info from customers, such as what oil they used, how long they had used it, and how often they had changed it. We also took note of the brand of oil that they kept in the trunk as a spare, which used to be very commonly done. The overwhelming amount of grungy engines had been using Castrol, remember, they advertised heavily back then. Our next hurdle was to figure out a point in a car's life that changing oil brand to Kendall might be too risky, and 60K miles became that number. We found that after changing to Kendall the screen at the sump plate became almost fully clogged, sometimes the crud was 1/4" thick in places. After we discovered this, and our customer still wanted to do the change, we ran Kendall for about 1K miles, drained it, cleaned the screen, and re-filled the engine. 3K miles later we did it again, and then put the car back on its normal schedule. We found that the typical car's oil consumption rate became much worse in the short term, but as the rings became clean and managed to re-seat themselves the consumption rate often returned to what it was with Castrol.

Is my information current? Absolutely not, I sold my shop in 1999, and everything that I've heard since then is second hand. Does my information lend an historical perspective to this situation? I think that it does, if only to fill in some gaps regarding why some individuals prefer one product more than another. Back in the day I had a large number of customers who proclaimed, "I don't care, oil is oil." That wasn't true then, and it probably isn't true today.

scottb

I'm late to the party here, and haven't read all 97 posts in this thread, so if this question has been asked and/or answered, please forgive me.

Has anyone evaluated ZDDPlus? It's an additive that claims to add the necessary zinc and phosphate to oil in older cars.

www.zddplus.com

I'd appreciate hearing comments as to whether this stuff is legit or is just snake oil.

Thanks.

Charles Navarro

It's not snake oil and will raise the Zn and P, but care would have to be taken to make sure you don't add too much - it is much more concentrated than EOS. Secondly, I would really like to know if Zddplus also has added detergents - when you raise Zn and P, you also have to raise the detergents, which was something I didn't really know or understand until I read it in an SAE journal. That's why the EOS had about equal Zn and P to detergency.

old man neri

I have no idea. I read the threads here and on pelican. What can I say.

I just put some 'elf' oil in this afternoon. Seems pretty nice, it was sold at the local porsche shop that deals in all sorts of other oils.

Here is their product line up It's hard to get some of the other oils for cheap in this country. The stuff I bought is the same price as mobil 1 and in the 5L jugs it has an extendable neck build right in, how cool is that?!?!??!

-matt

Mike Murphy

Nice car

old man neri

Why thank you. I picked it up from a very nice fellow rennlister in the Chicago area.....maybe you know him.

Dave in Clarkston

Wow! I wish I would have noticed this topic prior to having the oil changed this past week, with M1 I might add! Dam, now it's going to have to come out in when the car comes out of storage. One week earlier reading this and I would have saved myself $160!

Should there be any issue going from M1 the the B-P? The car has 88K miles and has been on M1 since about 65K miles.

Thanks for the outstanding information and education today!

Doug Hillary

Hi,
Dave - what version of M1 lubricant did you use?

Regards

Charles Navarro

No problems what so ever moving from a syn to a dino oil.