I’d be super happy if any of my engines looked that clean inside. What oils do you use and what is your maintenance schedule like?
I can’t tell what’s going on with the exhaust cam lobes on the second cylinder from the left. Looks like either you smeared it with a rag, or there’s some wear going on. All the other cam lobes look brand new though.
Yeah, I think I wiped one with a rag because I was curious about why it looked like that and it didn’t make a visual difference.
My oil changes are usually around 10k miles. I’ve done 12k occasionally when I do more highway miles and long trips but although still drive far once a week my daily commute is short now so I try to aim for 10k miles. I changed the intelligent oil life monitor to calculate based on 12mo/10k instead of the factory setting of 6mo/7.5k and I pretty much just follow it.
I’ve used various oils, always full synthetic. Usually 5W-30 but I’ve used 5W-20 or 0W-30 in the past occasionally. Most often I use O’Reilly house brand, sometimes Valvoline, occasionally Castrol, and I did use Amsoil twice.
Current fill is on Pennzoil Euro L 5W-30. This is the first time I’ve ever used a Shell/Pennzoil oil product and this is the first issue I’ve ever had with a leak, so although it’s probably not the oils fault I won’t be using it again. I’m thinking of trying M1 ESP 0W-20 next time just for the heck of it. Or just go back to O’Reilly oil, really depends on my mood the day of my oil change…
I do think I’ll change it next week just in case I got any contaminants in there while I had the VC off. Will probably leave the filter though for another go around.
For oil filters I’ve used mostly MicroGard, with a sprinkling of Wix XP or Wix. Now I am using the new MicroGard Select, which I will probably use for the foreseeable future, as it seems well constructed and I get a good deal.
Overall the vehicle runs fine but I definitely beat on it and drive it hard. I did find that 30-weights quieted down the engine a little although it’s always been noisy, although the noise has not changed from 60K miles when I bought it to the 130K I’m at now. Always just been a noisy, ticky, coarse little motor. Although that seems to be the consensus with the 2.5.