Motor Oil 106 – Chapter Six – What Brand Should I use? Which Oil is best?
By now if you’ve read the preceding 5 chapters – you may feel armed with enough basic knowledge to go out and start looking at different kinds of oil. Here you may come up with a common dilemma – which oil should I use? Which one is best for my car? Wouldn’t it be nice […]
Motor Oil 105 – Chapter Five – It is more complicated than you thought.
Engine oil today is much more than just the viscosity grade. For an introduction to engine oil, learning the viscosity grades and how they relate to each other is an excellent place to start. That is what we started with in Chapter 1-4. An engine oil has to perform many functions in the engine and over […]
Motor Oil 104 – Chapter Four – Conventional vs Synthetic Oils
So far, we have been talking about engine oils in a very general sense, focusing mostly on the viscosity/temperature relationship and how this has changed to include a complex mixture of base oils and viscosity modifiers. But we also need to talk about some of the differences between Synthetic Oils and Conventional oils. We will […]
Motor Oil 103 – Chapter Three – Viscosity Modifiers and Engine Oil
In chapter one we talked about how in the early days of the automobile, engine oils were very simple, basic refined fluids that helped keep moving parts easily sliding past each other. As time has passed, engines and engine oil has become more complex – allowing for different grades of oil with similar high temperature […]
Motor Oil 102 – Chapter Two – Oil Grades
In chapter one we talked about how oil changes viscosity as the temperature increases and the challenge it is to keep close to the right operational viscosity regardless of the temperature. If the operating temperature is 212F and the recommended viscosity is 10cSt then OIL A which can be made to be 40 cSt at […]
Motor Oil 101 – Chapter One – Operating Temperatures and Viscosity
Understanding what viscosity grades mean can be confusing. The average driver just tries to follow what is in the owner’s manual – this is a good practice. Some owner’s manuals allow for different grades based on the predicted operating temperature. For example, they may specify a 0W30 synthetic or a 5W30 mineral oil. Others may […]