I think I'm a stick in the mud... :(

[fuel tanker man]

Okay...

There may be a thread in the archives here where a UOA pointed a car/truck owner to a brewing problem and he was able to solve that problem because the UOA alerted him to it in time.

If any of you can find that thread I'd appreciate the read.

Dan

 

[Audi Junkie]

quote:

---

In an age of aftermarket where a simple cold air intake (4 cylinder NA) adds about 6 whp for 250 bucks.

---

...and you say more DYNO power after draining fresh dino for fresh syn??? That is something I'd like to see under controlled conditions. (anybody got an AWD dyno?)

I haaaate to play the antagonist all the time, but what would you suggest is the mechanisim for this "gain"? Since you are comparing baseline figures for different cars, I would suggest any differences are due to the overall condition of the engine.(fuel, air) In short, the syn guys had a better running engine because they took better care of them. Anyway, I seriously doubt ANY power gain, back-to-back dyno runs with the variable changing oil type. I have Delvac in my car now and am going back to GC in 2 months, I don't expect my 1/4-miles times to change. Maybe I should get a "cold" air intake.

Of all the people tweking their car on AudiWorld, I don't believe anybody found an intake that registered a power gain on a dyno.

 

[crossbow]

Just cause it doesn't work on audi's, doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Here's a dyno of a 6s before and After the CP-E intake/Maf Customizer.

This was done while the car was STILL strapped to the dyno, and the straps weren't changed. Dyno runs were subsequent, with the stock runs occuring on a cold car, and the CP-E run occuring after it.

One thing I've learned with cars, is no two cars are the same (dyno wise), nor are any two manufacturers cars the same (even if they use similar drivetrain components). Thus any mod that works on one vehicle type, may or may not work on another, so assumptions can never be made on their effectiveness until their tested.

On 1.8T's, cold air intakes won't make much difference, as their primary intake temps are directly affected by the turbo...in this situation most of the gains you would see from a cold air intake, are instead seen from aftermarket intercooler setups...which I'm sure your forums have shown variable gains in across the board.

As for the syn comments on power...yes your correct, its almost impossible to test. Thats why I pointed out the overall "average" baseline dyno's "across the board" are higher with car's running synthetic, then with dino based oils. Alot higher? No...but higher non the less.

I am merely pointing out that synthetics have other advantages then just extended OCI's and possible "extreme condition" protection. They do show a slight increase in power, and also show an increase in mileage. Especially if you do engine, diffy, and tranny oil all at once to syn.

 

[XS650]

quote:

---

Originally posted by crossbow:
Just cause it doesn't work on audi's, doesn't mean it doesn't work.

---

If your car comes stock with a good intake system, it's hard to make much improvement. If it comes stock with a restrictive system, or a system that doesn't get cool air, it's easy to make improvements. No big surprise.

 

[Bugshu]

Seotaji,

At some point in time you just have to let things be. I once had a 21 year old chevette sitting in my driveway that would still start and run. It was a hand me down car when it was 12 years old and I took care of it almost for another decade. Despite being able to start and run I couldnt sell it. It became a third choice vehicle and I would run it almost out of guilt because I just felt that if I had a car that would run that it was worth something. I honestly kid you not that the local junk yard wanted me to pay them $65 to give them the car. I finally found a taker for the thing and gave it away for free. It cost $200 to insure it for every 6 months and I wasnt getting $400 of use out of it every year. If I paid $400 per year and was putting 2000 miles on it then it was still costing me .30-.35 cents per mile to run that Chevette between insurance, gas, and routine maintenance. It just wasnt worth it. After 20 years I didnt enjoy driving the car or being in it and I didnt feel that its safety was state of the art. At .30 cents a mile it was costing me almost as much in added insurance costs as just adding an extra 1000 miles apiece to the normal drivers over the course of a year. Insurance is a fixed cost and adding insurance to a third vehicle just was costing more than the value I was getting out of the vehicles use. I was sad to see a perfectly working car basically die because seemingly nobody in the world wanted to drive it but thats how it ended its career. I think perhaps thats rare in the car world.

If one has 1-2 cars and they keep putting miles on them then I think its ok to drive a vehicle until the wheels fall off and if thats your thing then go for it. I allow myself about 1 new vehicle every 8-10 years and expect them to last 20 years or more. My dad likes to buy new cars and run them 6-8 years before he gets bitten by the new car bug and he usually looks for somebody to take a hand me down. I find myself having to just let one go every now and then because it costs more to insure it than its worth.

But thats me and others circustances may vary.

Happy Motoring All,

Bugshu

 

[ekpolk]

quote:

---

Originally posted by fuel tanker man:
Okay...

There may be a thread in the archives here where a UOA pointed a car/truck owner to a brewing problem and he was able to solve that problem because the UOA alerted him to it in time.

If any of you can find that thread I'd appreciate the read.

Dan

---

Dan:

If you go back to the UOA section and run a search on the terms "problem" and "issue" you will find a lot of things that fall into the "good save" category. Things like leaking intakes letting dirt in, to certain oils allowing too much bearing wear. Many of these may have been life-long "no harm -- no foul" sorts of things, but some of them have a distinctly ominous ring to them.

And FWIW, I don't think that a UOA has to find a potentially catastrophic problem to prove its value. In my first, I found that the insolubles in my wife's Sequoia were high, and got some good corrective recommendations. Since insoluble contaminants are essentially the building blocks for sludge, I think it was worthwhile to know that while my oil was otherwise performing well, there was this one key issue to watch. Now, will I do UOAs with every change? No, but I will use it as a periodic tool to get some objective info. If nothing else, it will give me something more to work with than the speculative opinions that so many folks like to throw around as if they were concrete facts.

 

[Audi Junkie]

On my V6, I just slap some specialty heat-shielding on my airbox and some flex-duct over my intake runner. It keeps that cool morning dense-air feeling long into hot summer days. I doubt it or any supposed CAI would make a dyno diff, I may be wrong. Did you actually see lowered intake temps or is there a breathing restriction in the oem system? I wanted to use the data-logging function of my OBD to test mine, but did not. Seems odd that a major mfg would throw away 20hp for no reason, but your product says it's a MAF enhancer or velocity stack or something. Seems like more going on than cold air, maybe some signal conditioning too, hmm? As for MAF mods/Velocity stacks on Audis, I recently saw a n/a 12v engine that came out in 1991 with 175hp tweaked to 300hp.

 

[427Z06]

Once a month I do without the prime cut filet, the eighteen year old Glenmorangie and the cheap date, which more than covers the cost of using synthetics in all my vehicles. Notice, how a little bit of military discipline goes a long way to achieving motoring nirvana.

 

[Audi Junkie]

I'm hearing the stock 1.8t airbox is fine up to the 400hp range.

 

[crossbow]

Audi,

The 6 stock intake system is very restrictive. About 8 hg/inch of restriction when flow benched. By contrast, the general smooth tubes of the injen and CP-E, have around 0.1 to 0.3 hg/inch of flow restriction.

The primary reasoning for the design of the intake system was sound deading

.

Intake temps are ambient with the CAI, as taken from CAN BUS capable scanners, such as the autoxray 4000. (Our car isn't OBD-II).

About the first 15 whp is from the intake alone, with the remaining bump in power from the maf signal tweaking.

Here's a graph of what the intakes themselves do...
http://www.aempower.com/pdf/dyno/22-483 2003 Mazda 6 s.pdf

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~greghess/scans/injen6s.jpg

 

[crossbow]

Hearing or flow benched? Technically my fathers 600 bhp 3000GT motor's stock intake is fine...doesn't mean that replacing it doesn't net a whole slew of more power, cooler sounds, and better aesthetics to boot.

Gotta address all aspects of a car's performance to match everything up correctly. Don't know about the audi's, but we'd replace the airbox system just to get some more **** room in the engine bay...even if it produced no power.

Here's the Mazda3's intake system to give you an idea of the complexity and size of something thats easily replaced with a pipe based CAI.

I'm just hammering in the fact that you can't make general all-encompassing statements on car performance and modifications based on your results with a single car.

Mods only ever apply to a single car make, model, and year. Outside of that, they have varying effects depending on the situation and design of the vehicle in question.

Of course this whole secondary discussion shot off from the fact I happened to mention that synthetic oils tend to show additional power to the wheels vs dino based ones...as shown in various baselines of the 6i and 6s.

No one has yet commented on the whole extra 2 mpg...

 

[Robbie Alexander]

Originally posted by Bugshu:
It would be an interesting debate as to whether or not or not a premium oil helps a vehicle over a premium filter.
******************************
No question the oil.

 

[ekpolk]

Crossbow: I can certainly be extreme at times myself, but please, please tell me you didn't rip up your car's entire respiratory system to take a photo to make your point here. . . If you did, take it easy, there are medications that can help. You should see a doctor soon.

 

[crossbow]

quote:

---

Originally posted by ekpolk:
Crossbow: I can certainly be extreme at times myself, but please, please tell me you didn't rip up your car's entire respiratory system to take a photo to make your point here. . . If you did, take it easy, there are medications that can help. You should see a doctor soon.

---

Ha! No thats from the mazda3. I couldn't find a good solid photo of the mazda6 intake system, so just snagged one that was equally depressing. The components in the photo are from a mazda3 owner who replaced his intake system with an AEM CAI, and a aftermarket catback exhaust system. What your seeing is the leftover

.

 

[OriginHacker21]

This has got to be one of the better threads I've seen

.

to Fuel Tanker Man and all of you!

My aunt had a Nissan minivan. She bought the cheapest oil she could find and ran it for 3-5k miles. I took a picture of the ODO before it died - 349,000 miles - I'll have to post it here someday. The timing chain guides? were worn out basically causing the engine to misfire a lot. They tried to weld the guides back but it didn't work.

I'm sure my car could hit 400,000 miles with dino oil as well - but I see my car as more of a hobby so I put a lot of time and money into it (synthetic oil, weekly washes/vaccumes, monthly waxes). Still, I still plan on running it till it dies.

 

[ryansride2017]

I have read all of the posts and I only disagree with one posted by salesrep:

"Given your viewpoints why would any of you spend time on this board?"

What does being a frequent member/visitor to BITOG have to do with using synthetic fluids? BITOG is not a site for pro-synthetic members only. Some members use them, some don't (I use them in one car but not the other). The purpose of BITOG (correct me if I'm wrong) is to find an engine oil that protects your investment as best as possible given your own set of factors such as cost, vehicle, driving style, etc., and explore the possibilites of extending OCI's to get away from the 3K mile oil change myth propogaded for years. Reading such posts from a Schaeffer's representative (also a site sponsor) concerns me. To summarize, a person using dino fluids should not be asked why they are here....because they are probably trying to achieve the purposes BITOG was orginally established (listed above).

 

[double vanos]

I am so loving this thread!!!! I had a friend, back in the late 60's and early 70's whose Dad worked at Schlumberger (that's a misspelling for sure) and bought only very used company cars with at least 100k+ miles on them. Every one of them was blue with a white painted roof. Most were Plymouth Belvedere 4 door sedans with 318 engines and a three on the tree transmission. As kids, we literally drove the sh!t out of those cars and they held up well - this after a lifetime of carbureators washing down the rings every cold start and the cheapest oil that could be found. Also, when you cruised one of those S O B's at 100mph (going to Galveston comes to mind) there was no overdrive transmission to help the engine out.

I've said it before: there are millions of people who service their cars with whatever, whenever, and still get 150k to 200k with no oil related problems at all.

Let me close with this - one of my friends at work is a dyed in the wool Castrol GTX fan and uses the 5w30 it in EVERYTHING he has including a '99 Corvette (which is supposed to have only synthetic)and a Scion something or other that is supposed to have 5w20. Changes oil every 5k and gets 200k to 250k out of every one of the cars he has owned.

 

[Benzadmiral]

A two-year-old thread, back from the grave! Cool!

My MB C230, a '97 with the normally-aspirated 4-cyl. engine, may *technically* qualify as a high-end car. If my previous Benz, an '86 S-Class, was a thoroughbred, then the C230 is a hard-working cow pony. One with superb genes, mind you -- a finely-bred quarter horse, say -- but hardly a show or "premium" car. It's my daily driver/errand runner (and hurricane escape vehicle!).

I've thought of going to longer intervals on synthetic; using 5W-40 Rotella and GC have both crossed my mind. But I really don't mind changing the oil on the car, it's a kind of a hobby -- along with the weekly washes and dolling-up of the tires -- and I'd miss the preparation, the sense of accomplishment, etc., if I only changed oil once a year. Plus, spending nearly $5/quart on oil outrages my (admittedly cheap) soul.

At 81,000 miles and 9 years, my C-Class is almost a new car by Benz standards, and I think it will last for a long time on good dino oil. Perhaps someday it, or one of its cousins, will wind up in the MB Museum in Stuttgart in the section devoted to models which "have proved themselves reliable in everyday service."

(Oh, and Double Vanos, as far as I know, Schlumberger is the correct spelling, even though it's pronounced "schlum-ber-zhay," right?)

-- Paul W.

 

[gedcruise]

There is great joy in running a car as long as you can. One of the easiest things we can do is change the fluids regularly, attend to cleaning (especially inside the fender wells and the underbody) and change the fuel filters and plugs as required. One of my brothers-in-law is a mechanical engineer with one of the remaining big two. He tells me that industry standard is 150K durability. To exceed that is bliss. We are, after all, people with a hobby here, which I believe is vehicle longevity. Buy it, care for it and use it. Run it as long as you can. Use syn, use dino, use Fram, use whatever, just keep it fresh and clean.

 

[thunderchild]

Your car/truck as a hobby. Now that hit's the nail on the head!! Both of my cars are like that. I have a 2k3 Durango and an Audi TT Roadster. My truck is my daily driver. She get's pampered the most I think. Weekly washes, monthly waxes, Shell or Citgo fuel only. I am using up my supply of Supertech synthetic 10w-30 and from then on she get's PP 10w-30. I just turned 74,000 miles and she runs like a top. I know I can reach 300K. My Audi is a "drive maybe twice a week and on weekends car". Take it to the coast with the wife to enjoy the sun and beach. I put Shell Rotella synthetic in her and she loves it. I love my "hobby". As a matter of fact I am a gear head who's wife will send him to the grave if I but another car. I don't know how she found out I have my eye on another Audi!