Yup, even 30 years ago in the National Guard we would take samples in for testing. If the oil was still good we left it alone. A lot of these pickups and Blazers only got driven a few times a year. A waste of money to change good oil.
I’m just the opposite, I think spring is the better time. My Pa in law lost the engine on a generator last year the first time he ran it after it sat all winter. Gas had leaked through the carb, diluting the oil. He didn’t check it before he fired it off. All my small motors get changed in the spring before I fire them off for this reason.
I see your point. Luckily all the engines I sold had fuel tanks lower than the carb and had fuel pumps . Kinda like cars. Bones
A cheap but effective field test is a simple business card. With the oil up to operating temp pull the dipstick out and let it drop a couple of small drops on the back side of a business card and let the card sit until the oil is dried, and read how it spreads out. An oil in good condition will be dark but not too dark, but will spread out evenly, all the same color. An oil loaded with lacquers will be real dark in the center where the heavier deposits will sit and the color will lighten as the oil spreads out. That's an oil run too long. Fuel diluted oil will spread out much farther and the outer edges will be very clear. Water contamination you all know, it's a frothy, greyish build up on the top of the dipstick and the breather/fill cap, and you might see rust forming on the dipstick. As far as running the dipstick through your thumb and finger and feeling the oil, eh, if you can read the oil that way you're better than me. I hear some guys taste it! (jk!) Here's an example (I pulled this from my wife's daily driver because it was easiest to get to). This shows a slightly darker inner circle inside a lighter outer circle, neither of them very dark. It's not bad, but it's getting ready for a change. It wouldn't hurt to change it now, but it's not critical.
Sounds like my Pop back in the day but he wouldn't touch a wrench and used Full Service Didn't take after him, in that respect but do drive Fords. Joe
I used to change the oil in the street / strip car multiple times a summer, but it was regularly running to 7000 rpm or more. I'd just save that oil and use it in my beater daily drivers, since they burnt and leaked it all out anyway. Now, late model truck, synthetic, 4k miles on oil. I put on a new filter, top it off and run another 4k. Still looks like honey. If I'm towing a lot I may lessen the interval. Wife's car, just go by the sensor. It's weird to me to do that, but I'm giving it a try.
years ago I worked at a junkyard in Tucson...soon I moved to Sierra Vista. But the fellow who owned the junkyard left his sons to run it, and moved down to Sierra Vista to retire. So he was an old guy, who knew cars, right? Anyways, he got a new lincoln, and he had always changed oil based on how it looked on the dipstick. The warranty didn't cover putting a new crank it it at 50k because he hadn't changed the oil often enough! I guess he didn't understand that the old ways just don't work so well on modern stuff. (and this was about 30 years ago)
You mentioned re-using oil reminded me of when I was in my old shop! It was real small , I couldn’t even get some of my trucks in it! So, I put my used oil drums outside, horizontally with a valve in the lower hole. They were in the open parking lot behind my shop that was located in a sketchy part of town! Funny, I rarely ever had to empty those used oil barrels! Bones
I was at my local tire/ service shop about 15 years ago, talking with the owner. He said “ let me show you something “ There was an OT Ford small car with 100,000 miles on it on the rack getting the oil changed. Steve , the owner told me they did all the service for the girl that owned it and she drove 150 miles a day…..the last oil change was at 50,000 miles…..and the car was still running great! Bones
Many years ago I worked at a Chevron gas station on main Street in Reno, Nevada In those days we checked oil and washed windows . If it needed oil and the dip stick was rusty I'd ask Havolin ? The customer would ask how I new the brand of oil needed. My response was "your dip stick is rusty"
I'm with Boneyard on this one. But, all my equipment with gravity feed fuel systems have a manual shutoff before the carb. Those with fuel pump and/or tank lower than carb, don't get or need one.
Not an oil spe******t. Probably change too often. Dad taught me 2500 miles and a filter. In all of the cars and trucks in our family from post-WWII, only 1 engine failed to make 150k miles, and that was a fuel-injected 1998 vehicle. Dad never mentioned an engine failure on a pre-WWII engine, but I didn't ask either. Longest run on engine was 440,000 miles, head never off the engine (300 CID); when I junked the truck after Missouri winter salt rusted it out the third time. Did lose a Lawn & Garden engine at 2200 hours. 2500 works for me.
Everything has synthetic in the crankcase except the Harley’s , nothing in the crankcase they are dry sumps , the get SAE 70 every two seasons . The 32 has big dollar synthetic it’s been in there for years , it gets a filer and top off every three seasons . If you think You should change more often than 10k as the owners manual states in OT drivers , there is one sitting here with 450K on the clock and uses O between changes and drips not one drop . Go figure .
I don,t understand your answer to this question.Has been discussed before. Ok, say you only put 1000 miles on you cl***ic for the entire season,way short of the 2500-3000 mile limit, your car will be in dry ,clean storage.. Even so it,s suggested by most that you change the oil anyway before storage or just before you start the car for the new season Why ? Gene
So what does an ****ysis tell you? And when you have the results, what do you compare it to? Does the test tell you “all fine, keep going” or “here’s your numbers”?
To Clarify .. This is something I do not do, I chain oil regularly ,, Just asking a simple question ,Why is this recommended ,I,m guessing moisture ,condensation I just like to know Gene in MN
Mine told me the numbers on a ton of stuff and also gave me a recommendation to not change the oil . Bones
Oil ****ysis tells you the condition of the oil, and it gives you information about the condition of the component the oil was drawn from. Interpreting that information is up to the individual. There is a whole industry built up around it to help you learn what the information is telling you, nobody can be a spe******t without training and experience. I've been working with oil ****ysis professionally for over 20 years. As far as what the report says on it, different labs do it different ways. Some labs are geared towards the non-professional, enthusiast crowd (Blackstone for instance). They gear their ****ysis and their report for that market, and it probably explains things for someone who doesn't know anything about oil ****ysis. Plus they are a smaller lab, so I think they're comments tend to be individually generated by a person typing them in. Other labs are geared more towards the professional fleet where the typical sample comes from a commercial vehicle, and the fleet may be small owner-operator, or the fleet may consist of several thousand trucks or tractors, and everything in between. The lab we work with processes upwards of half a million samples annually, and that's just for our business, they have their own business that generates about the same number. These high volume labs use automated systems to generate comments and recommendations base on the numbers, and they tend to be very generic. You need to know something about the metallurgy of the component and the oil your sampling. When I read a report I rarely even look at the comments & recommendations, I see so many reports and I've been doing this for so long, I tend to know more about what the numbers mean than the ****yst in the lab does. (I'm certified Oil Monitoring ****yst with the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers). One sample result is fine, it's like a snap shot, and it can tell you a lot of information; but the real power of oil ****ysis lies with the trending, when you have multiple samples from the same component, so you can see things increasing or decreasing. Say there's 70 ppm of Iron in the oil, is that good or bad? That all depends. Is it trending up or down? That makes a difference. 70 ppm of Iron may not be bad at all, depending on how long the oil has been running in the engine. But let's say it's been trending at <20ppm for all previous samples, and now it's at 70, that's not good. Basically, you need to know some metallurgy, you need to know typical wear levels, you need to know what other reported elements mean; i.e. what does silicon mean? What does Sodium mean? Pot***ium, Molybdenum, Calcium, Magnesium? Our ****ysis reports on over 20 elements, plus viscosity, fuel dilution, soot, glycol, water, oxidation, nitration, acid level, base level, and a lot more if you need it.
Changed the oil in a sbc project car when got it, 6 years later the oil had maybe a couple of hours total run time from moving it around in the yard ect. It is stored in a unheated garage in Wisconsin. A gearhead stopped over and after a few beers we wanted to hear it run with the fenderwell exit headers open Temperature was about 0 degrees in the garage , but it fired right up after 1/2 winter nap and soon a puddle of oil ran out from under the car so we shut it off. Found out the byp*** valve was frozen from moisture in the oil, the excess pressure blew out the oil filter O ring Pushed it to the heated garage to warm it up then dumped the oil that "looked clean" , the oil/filter change solved the problem.
Seems you have to be a person of many hats to get a feel for it, I understand a trend as you mentioned should be looked at, kinda like a warning sign. I appreciate the reply and insight.
You will get back a print out showing the break down of materials in the oil. If a bearing is going out you will see great PPM (Parts Per Million) of copper for example. I know some serious bikers that do a trip out West every year, Harleys. One year they all did an oil change of their preferred brand be fore leaving and did a baseline test. when they returned they all had the oil tested again. Very interesting to see the metals and chemicals in each test. At least one guy had a serious issue with the engine eating its self.
Tman: Was there more to the report you posted that includes the ISO Cleanliness code? My background is industrial hydraulics and we relied heavily on those numbers. Maybe that is not done in the automotive field. The code numbers will alert you if there is a negative trend in oil condition and impending doom. It is a count of three different micron levels of solid contamination in the oil.
My tractor specifies every 75 hours, but I usually do it every spring as it sees a lot of use moving snow during the winter. I also hit all the grease fittings twice a year when I swap the snowblower for the backhoe and vice-versa.
If you look in the comments you will see that the ****ysis states that the oil is good enough for to go more miles, even thought some results are abnormal. When I took my results, 40 plus years ago, to the br*** to get oil changes intervals lengthen , I had no abnormal results. The results can be interpreted many ways. But like mentioned another test with the same time or miles would actually give you a better picture of what is going on in the engine! Bones
The Jalopy Journal
