Ummm...

Yeh, OK. Missed that one. Sorry Danno!

 

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition, pg. 739, min-i-mum..."the least quantity assignable, admissible, or possible." SO, if your oil was at the minimum mark when you checked it 3 weeks ago, why didn't you ADD some right away? I would have known to top it up, and I'm a girl... -- I'm also one of those, who checks the oil and has the timing belt tensioned regularly. ...not to mention tire pressure, fluid levels and brakes.

 

i was going too, but wanted to change my filter and oil at the same time, so put it on hold for a week or two.. and in the meantime my hood-popper broke and my tools etc are at my parents.. so finally got the hood open again and checked..

 

If your oil warning light comes on while driving, you've already done damage. Get oil in that thing and plan on replacing your rod bearings, and preferably your mains as well. The oil light should NEVER come on, not even when racing and pulling high lateral G's. The worst I've seen is a slight dip/fluxuation in pressure in a high speed 180-degree turn, but no where near going down to "1" on the gauge or tripping the warning light.

 

Wow... you really went out of your way to quote the dictionary to give this guy some ****. And I don't see why the hell it would matter if you're a girl or not. Is that supposed to make it harder for you to maintain your car? And I'm sure we're all very impressed you can check everything regularly.
I like how you have four posts and as soon as you see someone getting some harsh advice you think you can hop on it too and act cool.

RLM might have been harsh but we all know he knows what he's talking about and the advice might have been harsh, but at least he said something constructive!

Sorry about a rant but crap like that pisses me off. You're totally new here and you just try to make someone feel a little worse. Yeah, he effed up, but you didn't say anything to help at all.
Especially that "And I'm a girl" bullsh!t!! What is that all about!?!

 

Pfffff...

C'mon. These are the kinds of things guys all laugh and joke about. "Yeh... my wife calls me the other day. She says, Honey, the car died. I don't know... it just died. By the way... what's that red light that says oil pressure? It came on first thing this morning and wouldn't go out?" Ha Ha Ha... we all laugh and say, "dumb broad" as we crack open our wallets and buy her a new engine!

Yeh... life gets busy sometimes, and everything goes wrong at once. But some things are pretty basic, eh? Let me ask you... would you check your oil, see it was at minumum, and keep driving? Lifters are ticking, oil pressure starts to fluctuate. Would you keep driving? Almost none of us would... even the girls!

# of posts has nothing to do with being right... right? Nobody is being hard on him just for the fun of it. I hold Porsche owners to a little higher standard, even if they are in a lowly old 944. Nobody wants him to feel hurt. He should want to dope slap himself and ask himself what he was thinking? Some things are just tooooo basic.

I hope you didn't hurt anything, cokeloop. Top up the oil, and get that new hood cable, eh? Maintenance is a wonderful thing.

 

You're right - being a girl has nothing to do with whether you drive your car without oil.

 

that sounds like my mom- i asked when her oil had been changed last, she told me that she didnt get it changed at 3000 miles, so she was going to wait until 6000 miles!

When i got my 944 n/a back i checked the oil and drove it straight home from Toledo. The next day i left w/ a caravan of people to go to the fest up near Cleveland. We stopped in Columbus and my oil light flickered. She was two quarts low! I quickly topped it off and checked it the rest of the weekend. THe first track event i went to i forgot to check it between two of the sessions and when i did it was like 3 quarts low! I topped it off and went back out on the track where i spun my first rod bearing. She was using some oil somewhere-YOU HAVE TO KEEP AN EYE ON THAT CRAP!
My brother in "law" bought a 944 n/a and had a habbit of not checking the oil regularly. He calls me one night and says its knocking real bad. When i pulled that motor down number two rod was in a pile on the bottom of the oil pan.

 

ive owned my car for a little over a year now. and in the past my oil light has come on multiple times. and usually i was quick to top it off. (trust me, ive gotten better at the maintenance aspect of owning a porsche)

but how much damage could have been done?

 

Hey;

"Damage" is an incremental thing, variable, and somewhat semantical. Excess wear could be considered damage if direct innaction contributed to it. You reach a certain wear limit where it matters. If something accelerates wear, it could be viewed as damage.

Rod bearings are not an easy thing to deal with. Simply changing bearings does not fix everything. You may forstall an immediate catastrophic failure by doing that, but you may create another set of problems. Putting new round full spec bearings into an old out-of-round journal will create problems just as surely. You will see FASTER bearing wear under these circumstances.

You really need to resize rods when you put new bearings in, and then further, set the tollerances to your intended purpose. Factory spec toward the tight end is fine for street use. If you intend to run it hard, you better set it up a bit looser. Oil volume is just as, if not more important, than pressure for hard use.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think I can speak for TraqBayB and say we honestly mean you no ill will, cokeloop. But ya gotta admit you needed a little hard reality check there, eh?

 

Thats nothing! Real men run their engines on 1 quart oil 1 quart ATF

 

Bah.

I just drink a bunch of beer and **** in my engine for oil.

 

thanks for the advice guys.. Didn't get hurt in any way, ive learned never to care about crap spread on the net, just pick up the good advice and move on

Have had my car for 3 1/2 months now, and not used to having an oil gauge, so wasn't sure what the normal values for this should be, but have read up on it now, and now as i have fresh new oil, its running smooth and quiet

Once the oil lamp flashed a few times I realized that the problem had to be something other than the valves wich people were telling me to get checked, but the oil pressure said 5 bar, and 2 on idle, so i wasnt quite sure..

Anyways, I depend on my car alot, using it way too often, and dont really have any replacement car to borrow if i should have to garage it.. The reason I wanted to wait on changing the oil, was that i wanted to change the oil filter at the same time, but none of the parts-dealers in town had any at the moment, and i was a little low on cash as well..

I like maintending my car too, gives me a special relationship to it, have to change my CV joints as they are chuckling a bit, tried to order online a week ago, but got an email back after 3 days saying they didnt have them in stock anyways and that my money (the little i had left) was on the way back to my account.. so will try again now once i get them back...

Also have a tiny list of things to do with it once the weather gets a little warmer:

-Tighten the hand brake wire

-Replace whatever it is thats making my gear stick wobbley

-Replace my wood wire /w lever and lever-housing

-Replace the crappy aftermarket window-levers that dont look good and that keep falling off

-Replace the back window sealing, my back seats get wet in the carwash

-Fix my driving lights, a defect lightswitch my mate tried in my car (to see if it was that causing his lights not to flip back down) knocked them out, only have brights now..

-Buy original fog lights (bidding on ebay as we speak ) to fill the holes in my front fender

-Weld the window-track thingy (how did that ever break off and get put in my trunk before i bought the car??) back inside my drivers' side door, as only having the one there make the window sometimes slide out of posision while going up and down, and the window-track doesnt like my trunk anymore

Got enough to do in other words

 

if you like maintaining your car so much, why go through automatic carwashes? they can damage your paint, snap antennas.. and who knows, they may even go wild and beat the hell out of your car.

 

I do automatic car washes in mine. The paint is too messed up to worry about in an automatic car wash.


For the record coke, if your engine is running low on oil you'd want to add more right away no matter what the situation. Its sort of like air pressure in the tires. Just because you're getting new tires and new air in a month doesn't mean you should be driving around on 5lbs of pressure now because you don't want to add more.