Do engines need a "breakin" before synthetic??

[Scottydog]

Originally Posted By: peterdes
Originally Posted By: Scottydog
Well my rig has 4000 miles so it seems the sky won't fall if I use PP.

Newtonville- Do you think Wix filter is adequate?

Thanks so much for all the advice. This is a great forum!

Got a pic of your jeep?

 

[doitmyself]

Nice Jeep. Show us some picture after you REALLY break it in! A Jeep needs a little mud to really be happy!

 

[iunderpressure]

uncrx2003, I just traded our 2007 Honda Accord with 84,500 miles. I was in no rush to change the oil at first. I ran the oil out until the OLM told me to change it. I think it was like 7500 miles. We drive a lot of miles, and several people on this forum are in a hurry to to get "wear metals" out of the oil. Our car never used any oil, and I was up to a 15,000 mile oci. I read where other poeple were using oil in the same motor. I like to run the factory fill all the way based on what i've see with my eyes. I also used RP from the first change to the last ,so maybe it was the oil I was using.

 

[uncrx2003]

I just bought an '09 silverado and I changed the oil at 600 miles. I could not believe all the [censored] that came out. That's why I'm a little nervous about letting her car run for that long before the first oil change. There are so many different opinion over on the crv forum while the mind set is very much different. Almost everyone here favors early oil change.

 

[Joseph Fihn]

I recently purchased a new, '09 Honda Civic EX & spoke with the service dept. regarding oil changes. They HIGHLY recommended not changing the factory-fill until the OLM gets to 15%. They mentioned that the FF is a "special" oil & needs to be the engine for proper break-in. I've also read about additional MOLY in the FF oil, however, I don't know if that is true.

Joe F.

 

[StevieC]

My Hyundai manual says "While no formal break-in is necessary we recommend that you drive normally and don't lug the engine within the first 1000 KM" and it also says to keep an eye on all fluids.

I changed the oil at 500/1000/3000/5000 KM before going to the manuals recommended OCI (using Dino) then switching to Syn

I also did a few WOT while rolling to set the rings as well.

Have over 200K KM (120K Miles) on the Santa Fe now, doesn't burn or leak a drop of oil and it beats government ratings for fuel economy!

UOA's come back superb all the time too!

 

[jesbo]

My BMW was factory-filled with synthetic and would have gone up to 15K miles on that oil if I followed BMW's oil change interval. I changed oil and filter at 1700 (BMW claims break-in is 1200 miles so I added 500 more). From then on its annual changes or 7500 miles whichever comes first. Every car I've owned in the last 25 years ran synthetic (Mobil-1) after the first 1500 miles or so. Never had a single engine wear issue.

 

[deven]

Group III oils are not "really" synthetic oil but just a highly refined conventional oils that can be labeled as synthetics so I would have no problem changing to them in my case usually around 500 miles with no problems as of yet.

 

[Roger]

The only person I've ever known to provide a reasonable observation for not using synthetic oils immedidately in a new engine came from Bill99gxe at the maxima.org site. He was a moderator there who collected & provided a UOA report on Nissan Maximas in the 2002 - 2004 period as BIOG was 1st getting established. He observed that people who switched over to synthetic oil right away with a new car (a Maxima anyway) tended to take longer before new engine wear numbers came down in UOA's compared to people who used conventional oil. Bill suggested if someone was truly concerned that they wait until they had 15K to 20K on their cars before using synthetic oil. I don't think he thought it was a big deal anyway as he frequently told folks who were using synthetic in new engines to "not worry and be happy."

The total number of UOA samples in Bill's UOA report were relatively few in those days, and the examples in the Maxima UOA spreadsheet he pointed to as evidence of slow breakin with synthetic oil had really tiny differences in wear numbers compared to regular oil. So I'm not sure he was correct, and I've never seen anyone else duplicate the observaton. Nonetheless Bill99gxe at least offered some evidence for his observation rather than simply promoting an unsubstantiated opinion as is frequently seen in posts about this question.

Bill99gxe was a great guy, and even posted for a time at BIOG sharing his UOA spreadsheets, but hasn't been around for years unfortunately.