Oil gurus, I am confused?

[Cmarti]

I did searches on here as I am looking to clean up some older cars. I see much about Auto Rx. Let's set that aside for a moment.

I see many posts where synthetic cleaned off the gunk and the pre-existing bad seal/gasket/ring is exposed . I see many posts where it says no oil can/will clean an engine. If the Synthetic cleans the crud off the seals and rings to leak, is it not cleaning the engine? Or if it can't clean, it cant leak?.....

I am tempted to run synthetic 5 w 30: Amsoil, Syn Max Life or PP , and pull the covers off my ford truck and son's Stratus and see if anything happened. If I do, I will report back.

My biggest misgiving with ARX is to go back to conventional oils and short OCI. I have come so far since discovering this site. I hate to fall off the wagon at 3k.......

any thoughts appreciated.

 

[02zx9r]

the autorx and 3K intervals is just for the original clean and rinse cycle. After that you can go back to whatever you want.

If they are heavily sludged then under the 'heavy sludge' application it does recommend staying with conventional but I would think if you are doing maintenance doses after a cleaning you could use synthetic if you really wanted to.

But I am not the creator of auto rx so I would presume that the person who created it would know how it works best so.....

 

[tntt]

You can use grp 3 synthetic oil like Pennzoil Platinum w/ auto rx. I'm in the clean phase and that's the oil I use. I think the ones they don't recommend using w/ auto-rx are grp 4 or 5 synthetic oils

 

[Pablo]

The main reason you are confused is probably because there are no hard and fast rules. Some oils will clean and loosen some types of crud. The oils will make soluble materials that are by their nature, soluble in oil. This is usually softer stuff, left over from condensation, old oxidized oil and oil additives. Hard material or thinly built up patina is tougher for oil to "clean".

As noted, once through ARx, you can choose an oil and OCI that logically fits the equipment and situation.

 

[Cmarti]

Thanks for the replies.

How would this work w/ ARX:
*Clean phase with syn maxlife or PP
*Rinse with dino
*Amsoil on 7500 oci

This is for a 2001 F150 4.6 (83K no consumption) that had a PCV go bad, and a 96 Dodge Stratus 2.4 (79K 1.5 Qt per 3K Consumption)

I realize I should have better things to worry about!

 

[Titan]

Your 4.6 Modular will probably be fine at 10,000 miles, or once yearly, whichever comes first, if you use those two "synthetics", maybe further if you used AmSoil.

 

[02zx9r]

Depending on your mileage throughout the year you could probably go further with amsoil than 7500 miles. If you put that on in just a years time then one year oci of amsoil will work

 

[Cmarti]

Originally Posted By: Titan
Your 4.6 Modular will probably be fine at 10,000 miles, or once yearly, whichever comes first, if you use those two "synthetics", maybe further if you used AmSoil.


I meant those in steps of an ARX cleaning:
1) clean ML or PP
2) rinse dino
Then regular 7500 changes
3) Amsoil (no Auto rx maintenance)

 

[02zx9r]

Even with amsoil I would do the maintenance dose every so often in an oci