I never thought much about Valvoline's fairly new Restore & Protect oil until The Motor Oil Geek recently posted a video on it. Once I saw his video, I did a bit more research on that oil and saw a couple reports of reduced oil consumption and such, but no before and after pics, so I decided to do my own test.
The first test is going to be my recently acquired 1990 Acura Legend Coupe with a 5 speed manual transmission and the C27A1 2.7L V6 engine. I don't know the mileage because the odometer broke at 176K in around 2002 (which I fixed), but the maintenance was apparently quite poor judging by the heavy carbon buildup under the valve covers.
It doesn't seem to burn any significant amount of oil, but it does have a lifter tick after being started cold, which lasts for a few minutes until the engine warms up a bit, at which point the ticking stops and it runs very well. The cold lifter tick is common on those engines if not properly maintained.
Compression is 180-185 PSI across all 6 cylinders with a nominal spec of 171 PSI and a minimum spec of 142 PSI, so I'm not expecting to see any improvements there since it's already very good.
This test is really just for fun since I plan to pull the engine and totally disassemble it to clean and rebuild it anyways, but may as well do some experiments on it first so we can all (hopefully) learn something. I just changed the oil and refilled it with Valvoline Restore & Protect 5W-30, so we'll see what happens. The previous fill was Rotella T6 5W-40 with a quart of Marvel Mystery Oil, which seems to have done little cleaning but that's a subject for another thread.
Here's the front cylinder head with the valve cover removed before the oil change. There's a good mix of varying degrees of varnish and hard carbon, so that should be a good engine to test it on.
The second test will be on my friend's 2010 Honda CRV with an oil burning ~225K mile K24 when its due for its next oil change soon. It goes through about a quart every 1000-1200 miles. Those years of the K24's were known for clogged/stuck rings, which I suspect is what's going on with his. We likely won't remove the valve cover for before and after pictures because, unlike my Legend, there's not much to see under there, so that one is probably just going to be an oil consumption test and maybe before and after pics through the oil fill hole.
I'll post updates as I have them, but I'm expecting both of these tests to be somewhat long term, so I'll keep you posted. Any thoughts or suggestions are more than welcome as always!
The first test is going to be my recently acquired 1990 Acura Legend Coupe with a 5 speed manual transmission and the C27A1 2.7L V6 engine. I don't know the mileage because the odometer broke at 176K in around 2002 (which I fixed), but the maintenance was apparently quite poor judging by the heavy carbon buildup under the valve covers.
It doesn't seem to burn any significant amount of oil, but it does have a lifter tick after being started cold, which lasts for a few minutes until the engine warms up a bit, at which point the ticking stops and it runs very well. The cold lifter tick is common on those engines if not properly maintained.
Compression is 180-185 PSI across all 6 cylinders with a nominal spec of 171 PSI and a minimum spec of 142 PSI, so I'm not expecting to see any improvements there since it's already very good.
This test is really just for fun since I plan to pull the engine and totally disassemble it to clean and rebuild it anyways, but may as well do some experiments on it first so we can all (hopefully) learn something. I just changed the oil and refilled it with Valvoline Restore & Protect 5W-30, so we'll see what happens. The previous fill was Rotella T6 5W-40 with a quart of Marvel Mystery Oil, which seems to have done little cleaning but that's a subject for another thread.
Here's the front cylinder head with the valve cover removed before the oil change. There's a good mix of varying degrees of varnish and hard carbon, so that should be a good engine to test it on.
The second test will be on my friend's 2010 Honda CRV with an oil burning ~225K mile K24 when its due for its next oil change soon. It goes through about a quart every 1000-1200 miles. Those years of the K24's were known for clogged/stuck rings, which I suspect is what's going on with his. We likely won't remove the valve cover for before and after pictures because, unlike my Legend, there's not much to see under there, so that one is probably just going to be an oil consumption test and maybe before and after pics through the oil fill hole.
I'll post updates as I have them, but I'm expecting both of these tests to be somewhat long term, so I'll keep you posted. Any thoughts or suggestions are more than welcome as always!
