longest amount of time on a conventional oil

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I was just curious to see the longest amount of time anyone has run a conventional oil in terms of months, I've heard of people running conventional oil up to a year and swear that it's safe..opinions?
Thanks
 
I just changed the oil on a friend on mine's 99 hyundai elantra about 2 weeks ago. It was the second oil change on the vehicle. The car has 62000 miles on it. Est. 33000 miles on the oil I drained out (along with alot of sludge). It still runs fine though.......LOL
 
A guy I know used to be a taxi driver in Kharkov, USSR. He once told me that because motor oil available from the state-run taxi organization the mechanics never changed oil in taxis and the cars ran for 400-500 thousand km before engine rebuild. That was about 25-30 years ago with non-API rated oil
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vvk,

They must be overcompensating now for all those years of deprivation. Do a google on Castrol 10W60 or Shell Helix Ultra and see how many Eastern European and particularly Russian website hits you get. They are in LOVE
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with motor oil!!!!
 
A neighbor of mine owns a garage. he has been in business for over 40 years. I have been told you wont believe this stories from him a few times. A little old lady drove up to the shop and said her engine was making a funny noise. Check the oil- no oil. She said her hubby passed away 5 years ago and he was the one who had the car seviced from time to time. In that time she never had anything done to the car other than putting gas in it. A few minutes later the car is up on the rack, remove the oil drain plug and get maybe 1 quart of thick, sludged,tar black oil. He filled up the crankcase with oil and flush, changed the oil filter and proceeded to idle and rev the engine for half an hour. Gave the car another oil change and a tune up and proceeded to tell the lady to stop by once a month to have her oil checked. What kind of car you ask? An old plymouth valiant( i think a 69 model) with a slant six engine. He said that lady drove that car for another 8 years before she bought another car!!
OK Ok here is another. A customer calls my neighbor and says he is having a hard time changing his oil and wants to know if he can squeeze the car in that day for an oil change. No problem. When the car gets to the station it is making all kinds of tick tick noise and was running very bad. The customer tells my neighbor that he bought the car new in 1979 and only added oil to it but never changed it! The customer brought in the car because his son had removed the drain plug and no oil would flow out
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. So here is the car 10 years later getting its first oil change at 68,000 miles. The oil was removed by heating the oil pan with a torch, once the oil got hot it came out in gobules of sluge and smoking liquid. The engine was filled with oil and engine flush twice that day to remove all the junk in the engine. Then for good measure it was filled with oil, driven for an hour and the oil was changed again. The car was an 79 olds delta 88 with a 350 engine. The engine did quiet down after all the junk was flushed out but the tick tick was still there. Dont know how long the car lasted because the customer never came back.
 
Yeah, a friend of mine went 3 years on a then brand-new Mazda 323 without any service whatsoever. He sold the car and I think the next owner went another year before changing the oil! The car is still running AFAIK.

Makes me wonder about those Camry V6 sludgemonsters? What's going on there...?
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My first car was an LC Torana, that cost me $200.

I took it for a test run, and the oil light was flickering slightly, checked the dipstick, and it was not registering.

Added a litre, and it went overfull.

The guy showed me his service receipts, and its last service was 7 years previously, although it was garaged for the last 12 months.

Took it home, scraped a couple litres of sludge from the rocker cover and head. Filled it with kerosene, and ran it at idle for 15 minutes.

It drained like diff oil.

Filled with cheap (read really cheap) 20W-40, and it burned about half a sump in a week. Changed it again, and it burned about half a sump the next week.

Changed it to Valvoline XLD, and it dropped to a litre every 5000 miles.

The little 138cuin 6 did blow a fair bit of smoke at 85MPH, but it was vergeing on valve bounce at that speed, so it was acceptable.
 
A friend of mine is a service advisor at a GM dealer and he says from time to time they get customers who have seized up engines from not changing the oil at all since they bought them new. He says in most cases the engines have between 40-50k on them. So GM's 36000 mile warranty is pretty safe (from GM's point of view!), since the engine will last at least that long even if the customer never changes the oil!
 
Myt old neighbor had a Ford pickup with a Windsor engine. He never changed oil-just the filter. When it died he did the shade tree mechanic thing with it. I helped him. It was too dead to save
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I have a PT Cruiser that has Havoline
5w-30(Chevron refinery) in the crank case with 8 months and 3,000 miles on it. The oil is just a bit darker than new and appears fresh. The last blotter test I did, looked clean and soaked in fast with no rings forming. So I'm confident the oil is good to go for quite a bit longer. It won't be however, as the next change I'm doing will be in about a month with Auto-RX to prep the engine before it goes to Mobil1 from here on out. But at least that gives you an idea of what 8-9 months looked like for me with regualr oil. Not an extreme example so here's a story I remember from about 10 years ago:


When I was taking some automotive service classes, I had a class being taught by an ASE master mechanic. He said he once had a guy with a Chevy Suburban come in that was pissed that the engine was making knocking noises. The instructor said it was making a bad rod knock but when he checked it out, the oil was black and thick like tar and it still had that original plain, flat black oil filter that GM puts on new cars(or at least used to). He said the Suburban had about 45,000 miles on it.

Just think, the Chevy was still running, although poorly, with absolutely no oil changes and 45K miles on the clock. From some of the above posts this doesn't seem out of the ordinary either in extreme cases. But you never know because there's also Toyota V6s in which thousands have seized up at around 30K+ miles WITH oil changes.
 
I kept oil in my girlfriend's motorcycle for a year (but only 3,100 miles) and a UOA showed a decent TBN. It had sheared down to a 40 weight though. Here is the URL for the UOA:

http://theoildrop.server101.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000675

Looks like the Harley oil is good for at least a year. Would have run it a bit longer but changed after the UOA due to the viscosity issue since it is the hottest time of the year.
 
The '94 Ford and '87 Dodge V-8's are both on a 12 month schedule. About 4k and 2k miles respectively on Roella T or Delo 400. I plan on doing a UOA on the Ford at the next change. I don't see a problem given the short mileage and lack of cold winters here.
 
i bought a 77 ford van with a 351W V8 that leaked about a half quart out the rear main seal when ya shut the engine off. Replaced seal and did the valve cover gaskets cause there basically wasnt any. Had an 8 track tape player too. Still running to this day. Main bearing had a scorch mark in it. 237,000 miles and original plug wires with 77 ford on them. Manual passing gear cli[p was gone that held the lever in place couldnt get a new one even from ford.
 
My uncle had a 1958 Chevy station wagon he drove on his sales route as well as for personal transportation. He seldom changed the oil, but would occasionally add oil when needed. One one of the rare oil changes, the mechanic couldnt get the oil to drain out until he used a screw driver to ream out the sludge blocking the drain opening. The wagon went many thousands of miles. I remember the paint was worn off the top of the driver's door where he rested his arm. No A/C!
 
my fathers old vw diesel engine went 10K miles per oil change, on vavoline car oil, not diesel oil.

after some time we took the engine out and replaced it with a turbo diesel.

the old engine still ran good, had good oil pressure but it wasnt a turbodiesel, so it was really slow which was the reason we changed it.
the oil drained out like cold syrup.
 
quote:

Originally posted by cryptokid:
my fathers old vw diesel engine went 10K miles per oil change, on vavoline car oil, not diesel oil.

after some time we took the engine out and replaced it with a turbo diesel.

the old engine still ran good, had good oil pressure but it wasnt a turbodiesel, so it was really slow which was the reason we changed it.
the oil drained out like cold syrup.


I worked for a motorcycle dealer that had a rabbit diesel pickup as a shop "truck." You'd have to push it off a cliff for it to build up enough speed to be considered "slow."

Everywhere you drove it was uphill with a headwind...
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quote:

Originally posted by jsharp:

quote:

Originally posted by cryptokid:
my fathers old vw diesel engine went 10K miles per oil change, on vavoline car oil, not diesel oil.

after some time we took the engine out and replaced it with a turbo diesel.

the old engine still ran good, had good oil pressure but it wasnt a turbodiesel, so it was really slow which was the reason we changed it.
the oil drained out like cold syrup.


I worked for a motorcycle dealer that had a rabbit diesel pickup as a shop "truck." You'd have to push it off a cliff for it to build up enough speed to be considered "slow."

Everywhere you drove it was uphill with a headwind...
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I had one of those, you measured 0-60 with a calendar
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TB
 
I have a farmer friend of mine who uses Cen-Pe-Co 15w40 oil in his vehicles and changes it every 10,000 miles with a Fram filter. He had a Rabbit diesel that went 290,000 miles till it died and a Nissan Sentra that went 246,000 before the frame rusted thru, but the engine ran fine.
 
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