quote:
Originally posted by fuel tanker man:
{snip}If, as advocates of synthetic oil superiority, we have reduced ourselves to saying "iron isn't really iron, or copper isn't really copper, etc.," we are in a peculiar position indeed.
Dan
Absolutely not. Dan, this sort of statement is where I really take issue with you. You're torturing what others said into something they did not say in order to harpoon an position with which you disagree. I think some would call it a "strawman" attack.
No one is saying "iron isn't iron" or "lead isn't lead". What they are saying, and what you're side-stepping, is that there may be a
source of metal other than wear that still shows up in the UOA. Oxidation is one source of such metal. Additives are another. I had an oddball reading on a UOA I did a while back which I could not understand, until Terry Dyson pointed out its an additive in fuel preservative. I cycle my older cans of fuel (which I fill ONLY when fuel prices are down and supplies are not challenged...) through my wife's Sequoia, which happily drinks 87. I therefore regularly feed it 5 gal cans of six-month-old 87 that's been dosed with Sta-bil. So what appeared to be an out-of-line reading on a UOA was easily explained by something very different than wear. Other OTC fuel and oil additives have been reported to have similar effects.
This is yet another reason why I think the whole premise is flawed. Metal levels in UOAs must be read in an appropriate context. Attempting to rigidly focus on only one of many possible sources of this metal (be it wear, comtamination, or what have you) just does not tell you very much. And it is certainly not the path to the conclusion you're trying to support, that is, that dinos are as good or better than syns.
One more thing. Other than simply poking fun at the idea, you really have not explained WHY syns known for their cleaning ability, should not show greater contamination levels on their early runs in a less-than-clean engine. While the focus of your derision has been Redline, consider also the Neo line. These oils are interesting because unlike RL, they are di-ester based, vs. poly-ester based. Di-esters apparently show an even more aggressive tendency to clean than their POE relatives. Neo's marketing info even contains a caution about how to change an older engine over to a di-ester oil, because of how quickly and effectively it picks up stuff accumulated in the engine. Assuming this "stuff" contains the same materials as the oil from which it originated, why shouldn't the oil that picks it up show higher metal content on a UOA?