valvecover removed pics

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Doug, what I should've said is that I highly doubt any oil could cause the problem illustrated in this thread at such a rapid pace. I do realize that substandard oils could cause a problem, but it wouldn't surface so fast.

Perhaps the SJ formula of Castrol SLX was a problem, but I doubt Castrol would bring an oil to North America that would cause problems like you've seen in the past, so I'm confident they won't have these problems with this SL formulation of the 0w30.

I will keep a close eye on things though, so thanks for the heads up, I do value your opinion on this board very much, as you definitely have a lot of great knowledge to share with us.
 
Well guys....I am up to 2000 miles on my first run with GC. After reading this thread, I popped a valve cover to take a look, and it is clean as a whistle. I am using LC as well though. I am going to finish a 5k run with the GC, and then I will refill with GC and do a 5k run in fair weather, as I want to be fair when comparing the GC to the RP I ran before.
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if the PCV valve clogs up again quickly then my guess would be excessive blow by, remove the oil cap while its running and see if you see any vapors from the valve cover that will indicate blow by. that means the engine is tired or the rings are absolutely stuck and not doing anything for you.

is your new PCV working? like pull it from the valve cover while running attached to the hose still and put your finger on the end of it to see if there is suction, if there is not, remove the PCV valve and see if you have suction from the hose, if not pull the hose and see if you have suction from the vacuum port (nipple) if you do not then you have excessive carbon blocking it in the intake and you will have to pull the intake and clean it.

hope this helps
 
Doug, don't take the teardown confirmation too far, there is MUCH I can do with a basic UOA and correlated data from other more indepth bench testing that is proprietary so the teardown or pulling stuff is a last resort in my book.

I'm convinced I would have seen the issue here BEFORE he found it under the valve cover if sampled regularily.

Racing or tracking a daily driver REQUIRES either UOA or in depth inspection as you are pushing a street engine/oil system to its limits not to mention laterally loading both sides of a system that was not designed for continued ops in that regime.

Akin to continually rolling/looping a non acrobatic airplane without getting an inverted oil system set up! You can do it a few times but not over and over again.....and I like to get inverted .....in planes....not cars. Although I've demonstrated it in cars too
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Have any more GC users checked their valve covers so far. I really doubt that this varnish comes from the oil. I saw that 350SBCgearhead didn't find anything in his 350 SBC.
Patman, how about you .... any more UOAs yet from your LT1 with GC
 
quote:
Originally posted by Alex D:
Have any more GC users checked their valve covers so far. I really doubt that this varnish comes from the oil. I saw that 350SBCgearhead didn't find anything in his 350 SBC.
Patman, how about you .... any more UOAs yet from your LT1 with GC
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I've got one coming real soon actually! I will be changing my oil in exactly two weeks, and it will have 10,000km on it (6200 miles) I should get the results by March 16 or 17. Even though it's an interval from October to March, it isn't going to be affected as much by the winter weather for a few reasons. One, it was much warmer here in Oct, Nov and Dec compared to usual. Two, I've been using a block heater every single morning for the entire interval. And three, at work I now have underground parking, and it's temperature is mostly in the 40-50F range and only once dipped down to 35F. So I have not had one super cold start all winter long. So I expect these results to be pretty good, especially since the amount of times I've been able to go full throttle is less than usual, due to the often wet/snowy roads this winter, at least in January anyways. Although I did do 14 quarter mile runs at the very beginning of the interval too.

[ February 29, 2004, 07:15 AM: Message edited by: Patman ]
 
I have read this thread very carefully and am not qualified to comment on the use of GC as I
have never purchased any.

However I am involved in marketing and the appearance of GC in Canada looks very like a 'dumping' operation.

It is only available at know discount houses , known to buy very low ( $$ ) but in large quantities and it is NOT available through the regular Castrol channels.

That 'fact' in itself sends out warning signals to me.
 
quote:
Originally posted by unDummy:
We need more people turboing, racing, autocrossing, offroading,.....with GC and post those results. This oil is overrated and nothing special.
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If someone wants to help me out with either the GC or the analysis I'll try some out. I have a 300zx that only sees autocross events and is never street driven except for going to the events.
 
I think the point being misses as per Doug and the 0-30 in Australia story is that the drain intervals there are at least 10k mi. If you piddle with 3,4, 5 or even 6k intervals you can stick with almost any oil. It's in the long run that's what separates the men from the boys with respect to oils.
 
While I am failrly confiedent that his seperator and PCV failure caused his concerns. It is still an area of interest. I have nver seen a PCV fail that quickly.

A good habit I started as a kid was every 3000 miles at an oil change I would pullt he PCV and spray a little bit of carb cleaner in it and give it a shake! I often had cars that had the same PCV their entire life!

I know they are cheap enough but doing this meant that every 3000 miles my PCV was being checked!

My wifes Buick had 109,000 on it and still had the origanal PCV. I am sure my Grandmother was not doing anything to it. It had some hard deposits on the outside but the inside was still faily claen!

Guys if this oil is causeing a problem then it is going to take extended drains and some more use then a mere 2000 miles. I am guessing that it would take 10,000-30,000 miles with it to really see a problem!
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dr. T:
I think the point being misses as per Doug and the 0-30 in Australia story is that the drain intervals there are at least 10k mi. If you piddle with 3,4, 5 or even 6k intervals you can stick with almost any oil. It's in the long run that's what separates the men from the boys with respect to oils.
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That's 10k kilometres, not miles. That works out to about 6,000 miles.

Well that's the Ford recommended OCI anway.

Dave
 
Just stating some observations:

1. The original post of the engine and others that have been added exhibit quite a bit of film. One could probably say that at least of the engines were starting to 'sludge'.

2. UOAs didn't indicate any problems.

Drawing some conclusions:

1. Related to another thread... would an oil that would start dissolving the films, like a HDEO or different formulation like Redline, produce high 'wear numbers' with a UOA ? I'd guess yes.

2. Have these oils gone too far towards 'wear protection' and sacrificed 'cleaning' ? I'd say yes.

3. Would shorter oil change intervals minimize the problem ? I'd guess yes.
 
after i replaced the PCV valve, the problem went away. i looked under the valve cover to do a valve adjustment after a few oil changes and everything looked spotless. i didnt use any oil addtives, so it was purely the motor oils that were in there that did the cleaning. ive used chevron supreme 10w-30 and did a short OCI of 1000 miles and used GC for 4-5000 after that. then i tried castrol syntec 10w-40 for 4-5000 miles and then switched back to GC for an unknown amount of mileage (over 6k+ miles). currently im using chevron supreme 10w-40 b/c i couldnt afford to do a synthetic oil change. but i plan on going back to GC my next oil change. ive learned my lesson, i change my PCV valve once a year whether it needs to be changed or not.
 
I think the clogged PCV answers the question as to what the problem is. I have never used GC and due to it being discontinued in my closest AZ I probably won't try to chaser it down. That being siad something is going on with this engine. If the new inezpensive PCV fixes it that is great. The fact that the clogged pcv is less than 15k miles old is suspicious to me. Something is not right with the sytem.
 
quote:
Originally posted by oilcanboyd:
after i replaced the PCV valve, the problem went away. i looked under the valve cover to do a valve adjustment after a few oil changes and everything looked spotless. i didnt use any oil addtives, so it was purely the motor oils that were in there that did the cleaning. ive used chevron supreme 10w-30 and did a short OCI of 1000 miles and used GC for 4-5000 after that. then i tried castrol syntec 10w-40 for 4-5000 miles and then switched back to GC for an unknown amount of mileage (over 6k+ miles). currently im using chevron supreme 10w-40 b/c i couldnt afford to do a synthetic oil change. but i plan on going back to GC my next oil change. ive learned my lesson, i change my PCV valve once a year whether it needs to be changed or not.
Click to expand...
Silly me I didn't look at the date. Glad it worked out well for you.
 
the old PCV valve did not make the clicking sound when i shook it. also, there was some oil in the PCV valve that prevented it from working properly.

maybe someone in here can explain why a faulty PCV valve would cause build-up on the valvetrain like that.
 
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