Originally Posted By: Garak
The methodology stinks and there's no error analysis, and for an engineer, that's pretty poor. He himself states it bares no semblance to what happens in an engine, so what's the point? Yet, he claims anecdotally to be able to have some correlation with track failures or some such thing.
So, what we have are anecdotal stories about how a non-reproducible test with no methodology adequately explained and no error analysis. And, we're supposed to choose an oil based upon this?
Originally Posted By: BrocLuno
There is no again. The info might help an older car owner looking at a plethora of oils. It might not, but what's the concern?
Then what's the point?
I don't know where you get your info from but ain't 540 RAT. He does purposefully state that he is not duplicating an internal engine that would take years and thousands of hours of run time to generate data. He is testing resistance to wear in a controlled pressure test rig:
My test equipment is NOT intended to duplicate an engine’s internal components. On the contrary, the test equipment is specifically designed to cause an oil to reach its failure point, in order to determine what its capability limit it is. And every oil I test is brought to its failure point, that’s how it works. The difference in the failure points, is what we compare.
But it is oil to oil testing. The number and scale are tied to the test environment. But the relative ranking is still valid... It's done at oil running temps (230*), it's repeatable and has been used by a lot of pro racers to help determine engine failures related to wear/lubrication. And that's what we are talking about, isn't it?
Besides, you'all should be open to testing with numerical results. Sure, skepticism is good thing, but not even paying attention to the work is not. Diss'ing someone w/o looking deeply at their work is not a good habit ...
I am parsing his work to try to remove the additive reactions in some samples and to re-list newer oils where they replace older ones. His blog is temporal in that some of the oils have been superseded and that info is further down the commentary, so it does not read as one table or group, but it's still valid within itself and I have learned a lot by forcing myself to re-read and reorganize it to my liking
I think others might too... Known good oils seem to fair well. Snake Oil seems to fair poorly. About what you'd expect. I suspect that some Snake Oil fan-boys are upset, but let them bring their test results (not opinions) forward and see why they more right...
