Is it time to change oil viscosity?

[Mr.Spool]

The real hang up is that people believe thicker oils create higher film strength and that is absolutely not true and the majority of motorheads believe that to be true because it's repeated over and over again. Film strength is created in the additive package, not the base oil as Brad Penn would have you believe and their oils have some of the lowest film strength. If thicker oils created More film strength then the oils in 540 rats blog with the highest viscosity would have the highest film strengths, but they don't. The thinner oils on his list, typically 5W-30 have the highest film strength. Can we say that the thinner the oil is the higher the film strength? Absolutely not. It's the additive package. The most powerful Corvette engine currently produced comes from the factory with thin oil.

Are you basing what your saying soley on 540 rats article?

 

[turbocamino1]

Re Rat540's credentials...from his blog >"Lifelong Gear Head, Mechanic, Hotrodder, Drag Racer, and Engine Builder...a working Professional Degreed Mechanical Engineer, and Mechanical Design Engineering is what I do for a living. A Mechanical Engineer is clearly the most qualified Engineer to test motor oil that was formulated by Chemical Engineers,..holder of THREE U.S. Patents, for breakthrough designs of Mechanical devices for Military and Commercial Aircraft" I've personally takes the 10 hours to read all of his blog.. Surely seems an honest accesment to me. After 30 years in a race fab shop i can smell a "Rat"..not in this case though.

 

[Mr.Spool]

Re Rat540's credentials...from his blog >"Lifelong Gear Head, Mechanic, Hotrodder, Drag Racer, and Engine Builder...a working Professional Degreed Mechanical Engineer, and Mechanical Design Engineering is what I do for a living. A Mechanical Engineer is clearly the most qualified Engineer to test motor oil that was formulated by Chemical Engineers,..holder of THREE U.S. Patents, for breakthrough designs of Mechanical devices for Military and Commercial Aircraft" I've personally takes the 10 hours to read all of his blog.. Surely seems an honest accesment to me. After 30 years in a race fab shop i can smell a "Rat"..not in this case though.

I've read the blog as well
I've read also the other articles that do discredit him.
I do like to look at both sides of the coin.
There is so much info out there on oils.
I have alot of experience on my own stuff and being in the race car world with some really fast guys and smart guys
From what I have seen finding out the oil change frequency that a particular engine needs seems to be the most effective way.
Have a friend that used to run straight Dino oil on very high horsepower car and his teardowns are unbelievably good.
His philosophy was he would rather change the cheap stuff more often and the Dino oil was good enough

 

[Shuttle Guy]

Some of the best pissing matches are oil topics.
If I need something from Walmart that will cover my ASS ill buy underwear not oil.

Some of the best pissing matches are oil topics.
If I need something from Walmart that will cover my ASS ill buy underwear not oil.

Since Quaker State has been mentioned, the next legendary topic will be how QS caused paraffin buildup in engines back in the 70's and 80's because the stuff was a bad product.

 

[Ttype6]

You didn't think that was funny? The last time I broke in a flat tappet cam there was no such thing as break in oils. Since the late 80's I've only ran solid rollers.

Well that's interesting, I can't really remember if I used an actual oil referred to as a break in oil because it's been so long since I had a flat tap at cam but I definitely did the 2000 RPM thing for 20 minutes.
Do you run a solid roller in your regal?

 

[THensley]

Since Quaker State has been mentioned, the next legendary topic will be how QS caused paraffin buildup in engines back in the 70's and 80's because the stuff was a bad product.
I thought I was the only person that remembered that. And I have two good stories about it but I'll keep it to myself.

 

[Ttype6]

I've read also the other articles that do discredit him.

There is so much info out there on oils.

Have a friend that used to run straight Dino oil on very high horsepower car and his teardowns are unbelievably good.

If you're saying that you have read articles that discredit him, the only way that they could discredit him is if they proved his testing methods were wrong and there's no one who has done that because they don't even know what his testing methods are. The only way you could prove his testing methods wrong is to use one of his highly ranked oils and have problems and no one has done that.

There is a lot of info on oil like oil analysis telling you what's in the additive package which means nothing. The only thing that matters is film strength and there's only one place to find out how much film strength your oil has and that's with 540 rat.

I can well imagine that your friends Dino oil protected his engine very well because the evidence that he has is what he observed when he tore his engine down and looked at everything and measured it. That is undeniable evidence that his oil protected his engine which brings up another point. I've already said that viscosity doesn't increase protection and neither do synthetic oils increase protection. The reason we know this is because there are very thick oils that are highly protective and very thick oils that are not and there are very thin oils that are highly protective and very thin oils that are not and there are oils with high amounts of zinc that are protective and their are oils with very little zinc that are highly protective and there are more of those. Also, there are non-synthetic oils that are very protective and non-synthetic oils that are not just like there are synthetic oils that are very protective and synthetic oils that are not.

Because of these truths we can't say the viscosity matters and we can't say the amount of zinc matters and we can't say being synthetic or non-synthetic matters. After we eliminate these three things it leads us to the additive package and the film strength that it creates.

If we want to look at oil and how protective or non-protective it is I think one thing we can look at is the rash of flat tappet cam failures which still exist and I do remember the oil that I was using when I had my failure and it was Brad Penn Penn Grade 10w 30 synthetic blend. When I watch videos where people talk about cam failures and they look at metallurgy, the only thing they mention about oil is that it can't possibly be at fault, the only thing in the engine that is supposed to keep two parts from rubbing each other to death. Really, it can't possibly be the oil? When I looked at 540 rats list of oils and their film strength, Brad Penn was and of course still is way down on the list and that's a clue and I would invite anybody else to remember what oil they used when they had their flat tappet cam failure and look on his list and see if you can find the engine oil that you used and see what it's film strength is according to his testing. Even that's going to be very difficult because I don't believe he started his blog until 2013. Also I used BR30 Driven break in oil and I don't even understand why I did because I had a roller cam and because of my xfi lobes which I actually regret choosing because they are a little bit more noisy than what I had before that but definitely not obnoxious and I left the oil in the engine for 500 miles to break it in slowly because it was one of two ways they recommended breaking the engine in which I realize now is another myth. This break in oil by design has a zero protection and a pitiful film strength. Because of my fast ramps, I needed spring pressures that were 170 on the seat and 450 over the nose and I also did something that I had never done since I've owned my car and that is after I took the break-in oil out and changed my oil I started my engine with the ignition disabled so I could turn the engine over until I had oil pressure and it took forever for the oil pressure to come up so the only thing on my rocker shafts was a very thin film of that pathetic break-in oil and it was getting thinner and thinner with each rotation of the engine. I can't say that this caused the problem that I discovered later on when I found an incredible amount of galling on the bottoms of my rocker arm shafts and by that time I was using Quaker State ultra durability 5W30 because at that time that was the king then they switched to full synthetic. After taking my rocker arms off and discovering the galling and that the needle bearings in my rockers were perfectly fine I simply remounted with my shafts upside down because it makes no difference and after a year I went in there and took the rocker arm assembly off of one of my heads just to look and see what was going on and the new wear pattern on the fresh portion of my rocker shafts was beautiful and polished and I consider that to be more evidence, but it certainly doesn't prove his methodology wrong, it supports it.
One last thing I would recommend all of us do is remember what kind of oil or oils we've used with our flat tappet cams where we didn't have a failure and then go to his list and see if you can find those oils and see how they rank.

 

[Mr.Spool]

Because of these truths we can't say the viscosity matters and we can't say the amount of zinc matters and we can't say being synthetic or non-synthetic matters. After we eliminate these three things it leads us to the additive package and the film strength that it creates.

A logical conclusion that a few of us debate based on how the engines look at teardown and we see multiple differences in success.

 

[Pronto]

Here's a nice video by David Vizard on flushing break in oil. Vizards been around a long time and done a lot of performance testing and racing. The oil analysis he has done show some interesting things. He's got many videos that are very good at explaining how engine performance is gained.