Are you basing what your saying soley on 540 rats article?
Is it time to change oil viscosity?
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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
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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
No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.
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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.
LANDAU LIMITED
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Yes, did the break in also. I owned a GN from 89 to 91 that was all stock and my current Limited has the original cam also. When I switch cams it's definitely getting a hydraulic roller.
Shuttle Guy
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Personally, I will listen to what a tribology engineer has to say about oil over that of a straight up mechanical engineer every day. Tribology is a very specialized discipline of engineering. Tribology engineers exist with the explicit goal of minimizing friction and wear and optimizing lubrication to improve system performance. Tribologists have a much deeper education and understanding with regard to materials science and chemistry than do ME's. I worked with a PhD tribologist at Blue Origin and she was amazing. She educated many ME's on the subject in her time with us.
LANDAU LIMITED
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Okay, I'm all ears, what's the Tribology expert say Quaker Stste or Valvoline?
Yes, it's the only place I know of where you can find the single most important thing about your oil and that's film strength. He also finds out what temperature your oil can reach before it starts to experience the onset of thermal breakdown.
It's a very expensive way to discover if your oil is protective or not and that's why I like 540 rats list. Now you can just go pick an oil with super high film strength instead of guessing and you won't have a problem. I put Quaker State full synthetic 5W30 oil in my regal and my two daily drivers and my two lawn mowers. Do I need that kind of film strength in my two daily drivers? No. Then why do I put it in there? Because it's the least expensive oil you can buy as long as you buy it from Walmart.
Is the reason that you want to put a hydraulic roller in it because you don't want to have a cam and lifter failure?
Yes, he's a very smart guy and he's one of the first people in the performance engine world to say zinc doesn't matter and it's not what you think it is. But you can't go to him to find out what your oil's film strength is. His experience much like mine is that he ran a lot of engines with a lot of oils that didn't protect his engines and the only way he could find out was after the fact when he tore the engine down and of course along the way he tore engines down that he used different oils in to find out that they were very good oils because the engines experienced no or little where. 540 rats list of film strength is priceless.
Tribology, by definition, is the science and engineering of interacting surfaces in relative motion, encompassing friction, wear, and the lubrication. Notice the word engineering. By definition, 540 rat is a tribologist. A mechanical engineer is the exact person needed to test an oils film strength.
A tribologist can tell you why they put calcium in an oil's additive package and it will all be true but as far as I know there's never been one on the planet who can tell you what the film strength of your oil is and that's the most important thing to know. Every other thing about the additive package plays a supporting role in protecting your engine but they're useless if they're supporting an oil with low film strength. There's not one oil advertisement that tells you what the oils film strength is and there's not one bottle of oil that lists its film strength and there's no organization forcing oil manufacturers to list their film strength through a standard regulated measuring procedure. If you don't know what your oils film strength is, you're gambling. 540 rats list is priceless. And how awesome is it that the oil with the highest film strength on his list is the least expensive oil you can buy. It's a no-brainer.
I recently took the opportunity to reread the beginning of his blog all the way up to the number one oil on his list and because it's so long there are certainly things that I forgot and it was good that I reread it.
One thing that I forgot about was a couple of more attributes that thick oils have over thin and that has to do with air bubbles. Every engine is trying to create air bubbles because of the windage so another quality that oil needs to have is the ability to get rid of those air bubbles or minimize them and in a thin oil the air bubbles can come out of the oil much easier than thick oils and a good comparison would be the difference between water and cream. You can whip water and it'll put air bubbles in it but they come out very rapidly and when you whip cream it turns into whipping cream and because of its thickness those bubbles stay in there much longer and that's another problem that thick oils have along with the fact that they can't flow through tight spaces as good as thin oils. A common attribute to thick oils in general is that they can handle higher temperatures before they start to experience the onset of thermal breakdown. One of the reasons that people choose thick oils, and by the way no NASCAR engine has thick oil in it, is because it can handle temperature and it doesn't get as thin when it's hot so you buy it thinking that you're doing your engine a favor because it can handle high temperature, but the other aforementioned problem that it has is flowing into tight spaces and when it does this those molecules are rubbing against one another creating heat so the problem with thicker oils is that they first create heat and that's not good but secondly they can handle a lot of heat. If you put a thinner oil in an engine that you're previously running thick oil in and now you have this thinner oil that's not heating the oil up as much in the first place as the thick oil, you'll find lower temperatures in the oil sump.
One thing that I forgot about was a couple of more attributes that thick oils have over thin and that has to do with air bubbles. Every engine is trying to create air bubbles because of the windage so another quality that oil needs to have is the ability to get rid of those air bubbles or minimize them and in a thin oil the air bubbles can come out of the oil much easier than thick oils and a good comparison would be the difference between water and cream. You can whip water and it'll put air bubbles in it but they come out very rapidly and when you whip cream it turns into whipping cream and because of its thickness those bubbles stay in there much longer and that's another problem that thick oils have along with the fact that they can't flow through tight spaces as good as thin oils. A common attribute to thick oils in general is that they can handle higher temperatures before they start to experience the onset of thermal breakdown. One of the reasons that people choose thick oils, and by the way no NASCAR engine has thick oil in it, is because it can handle temperature and it doesn't get as thin when it's hot so you buy it thinking that you're doing your engine a favor because it can handle high temperature, but the other aforementioned problem that it has is flowing into tight spaces and when it does this those molecules are rubbing against one another creating heat so the problem with thicker oils is that they first create heat and that's not good but secondly they can handle a lot of heat. If you put a thinner oil in an engine that you're previously running thick oil in and now you have this thinner oil that's not heating the oil up as much in the first place as the thick oil, you'll find lower temperatures in the oil sump.
LANDAU LIMITED
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No such such thing as never having a cam and lifter failure regardless of what you run. Now as for flat tappet cams they are more prone but that's only one reason.
I'm not talking about a roller lifter coming apart or a part inside of it becoming magnetized. I'm specifically talking about flat tappet cams and lifters and them chewing each other up. It looks like you're saying that possible cam and lifter failure is one of the reasons on your list of reasons for choosing a roller cam over a flat tappet cam but not the only one. The major reason that I'm spreading this information is so that people can come to the realization that that shouldn't even be on your list of reasons for choosing a roller cam over a flat tappet cam. It's the oil not the inherent design of the flat tappet Cams and lifters that has caused all these problems.
I rebuilt a transmission for a guy about 5 years ago and after he put it in his car he came back to visit me so that I could see his car but the thing that impressed me the most was how quiet his stock engine ran and it seemed like it was idling at about 750 RPMs. The one thing I don't like about roller cams in our Buicks is the lifters and more specifically that link bar that absolutely is going to rattle and make noise so now you've got increased valve train noise but that wasn't enough for me I also had to choose some xfi lobes which I regret because that brought the noise level up to another level but still not objectionable but I sure did envy the sound of his engine.
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