On Wed, 09 Jul 2003 14:49:12 -0700, dirtbeard <dirtbeard@pacbell.net>
wrote:
>
>Shop Talkers,
>
>On a corollary, Harley Davidson prior to this year
>specifically did not recommend synthetic oil for
>their air-cooled V-twins. They recommended 20w50
>dino oil with the diesel specification. Of course
>they specifically requested you to buy Harley oil
>for about 3X the market rate for standard mineral
>20w50.
Volkswagen UK had a similar thing with oil for their direct injection
diesels. You couldn't wander in with your car for service and fetch
your own can of Mobil 1 Turbo Diesel even though it had the latest API
rating, they insisted on the VW certification being correct (their own
brand oil had quite amusingly a lower API rating)
After about a year Mobil rebadged the oil. The API rating never moved,
the VW one did, so one could possibly assume the oil stayed the same.
Meanwhile customer has to have potentially inferior oil in engine.
As for design engineers knowing less about their products than some
customers I take that as read for a lot of consumer products now. A
designer rarely sees a returned product and sometimes the same old
faults get perpetuated for years. Sometimes the designer is off to
work for a competitor before the product comes off the production line
and anyway cost cutting by "management" and the production bods means
the final product is probably not what the designer intended in the
first place.
Anyway, back to oil. I've run all my generators/strimmers/rotavators
on synthetic for many years now with no ill effect. (Honda/Briggs &
Stratton/McCulloch)
Oil might possibly get changed every 2 or 3 years and they always
start on the first or second pull. Ok so they each only run for about
50-100 hours a year but one of the units is a good 25 years old now
and none of them have needed any internal attention (carb blockages
and magneto problems is all that has ever gone wrong)
I'm not sure if this is oil related or not but one rotavator got
flooded by a river to a depth of about 3 feet above the engine. It was
there for a few weeks as the ground liquefied underfoot. We drained
the oil, dried it out in the sun, cleaned the carb and after priming
the combustion chamber with a slurp of fuel it amazingly started on
the first pull. The engine is still going strong and hardly burning
oil 5 years on.
A couple of years ago the generator also ran for about a week 16 -18
hours a day with unmeasurable oil consumption (a Honda 4 stroke 1.5kVA
from the late 70's) It's been on synthetic since the mid 80's, and I
can only recall doing an oil change twice in all that time. - It
always comes out clean too. Is it ever going to wear out? Should I
change to regular oil asap? I'll take a lot of convincing.
Incidentally I know someone with a two stroke strimmer who uses old
synthetic (12,000 mile stuff) drained from his car. Not sure if that's
a good idea or not but he's convinced of the benefits!
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