Oils Aint Oils <Merged Thread>

[RAP1D]

LOL yeah maybe!

It's really an oil for high reving motors, so prob not the best for cold morning start ups ect

[XR06T]

just changed from nulon full synth 15-50 to 10-40. havent noticed a difference. I baby it till the water temp gauge is past 1/4 anyways..

[Full Monty]

Great Post Lawsy, really appreciate the input from someone in the know.

Chris, your post contradicts common thinking and what Lawsy has posted.

0-40 is a good weight of oil for cold start up, but not so for constant high temps / loads I.e track days, I would have thought 10-40 minimum, as the motor is operating at high temps for a sustained period, lightweight oil becomes too thin, weak film strength.

15-50 would be even better?

your thoughts lawsy?

[Lawsy]

------====The short answer.

0w or 5w oils in the Ford motor:-

Instant protection on a cold start = bad,

Protection from 5 seconds until full circulation = good,

Protection after full circulation (less than a minute) = good,

10w or 15w:-

Instant protection = good

Protection from 5 seconds until full circulation = good (maybe not as good though),

Protection after full circulation (but it takes a bit longer than the 0w or 5w) = better

Assuming both oils have the same running temp viscosity, the protection after running temp is roughly the same.

So, from Time zero to 30 seconds after a cold start, 0-5w fails, 10-15w wins. From about 30 seconds till warm, the 0-5w probably has the upper hand, since it reaches full circulation and running temp viscosity earlier. But the first couple of seconds of a cold start is what does almost all the wear to the motor.

So whats the point?

------====The long answer.

If you're going for track days, you always do a warmup lap or two anyways; so I would highly recommend you not use the 0w-40. Infact (Heads up Chris), I recommend you change from that oil as soon as you possibly can, as every time you start your car in the middle of summer, the oil would have fully creeped. This is bad. The Falcon has good tolerences, yes, but its still no Audi or Ferrari, where a 0W or 5W is borderline too thick on a cold start before the engine has thermally expanded (its very slight, don't worry, but it is there, and they rely on it).

The Ford motor doesn't quite have those tight clearance, so the oil can much more easily creep down (oil has this funny property where if it has a small gap to go through, it will act 'sticky'. The viscosity of the oil required to have this effect is completely dependant on the size of the gap. Thus, the bigger the gap, the thicker the oil needs to be in order to not creep through it quickly. Eventually, it will get through, but you can prolong this for days, and if you put extremely thick oil in a tight engine, weeks. Don't do that.).

Anyways, the 0w-40 truely is a waste of your added cash. Don't get me wrong though, Edge is a quality oil, and I do sell it to cetain customers at work who have been specified in the owners manual to run a 0w-40 in. But, as I mentioned the other day, the 5w and the 0w in our climate (unless you live down near the Perisher Blue, where in winter I'd have no worries recommending it just to be sure; incase you need to start the car at 3am, you never know) is useless.

Thus, 10w or 15w is where you want to be. It doesn't matter if you're doing track work or if you drive like Stevie Wonder, a 5w or 0w is certainly not the direction you want to be going, since when you first start it up, you're going to have little oil in the places you want. With a 0w, the problem is ever so slightly worse. But again, in our climate, a 0w and a 5w is roughly the same at round 20°C (notice I'm re iterating that point over and over.......).

I really don't wanna see a bunch of guys on here needing early rebuilds to be told "metal to metal wear and tear"' is the reason; it is a real issue, but isn't something you can "feel" or notice; not yet anyway).

So play it smart, run a 10w or 15w, and stay in the 30-50 range. 30 in really cold area's, all year round, 50 in very hot, or very high power applications. The 40 is for everything else.

That being said, I can't really see a better compromise between cold start performance and good protection than a 10w-40.

Oh, Mobile 1 5w-50 is apparently very close to being out of the "5w range", so you can try that also, since if that apparent bit of information is true, then as the story goes, it's as close to a 10w you can get, without actually using a 10w... If you get my drift... You'd get the benefit of knowing the base stock is nearly at the top of the food chain, even if Mobile 1 is slightly over rated.

[Adam]

Umm yeah...

Once I've done a few more km's I'm changing to fully synthetic 10w-60.

[seventytwo]

Too much good info to be lost in the general clutter, so I will pin this to keep it on the top of the pile.

[Lawsy]

Umm yeah...

Once I've done a few more km's I'm changing to fully synthetic 10w-60.

How much grunt do you have? Do you run a fair bit of timing advance? Very hot climate (do you live on the surface of the sun?)?

Otherwise I can't really suggest you run the 60.

Are you burning oil?

[Adam]

It's stock at the moment.

I used the same oil in my old ute with 300+rwkw's for 50,000km's and never had a drama. Castrol recommend that oil and it's FPV approved.

[Lawsy]

Being stock though, you can run better, for less money, and get more protection.

It is a recommended oil, yes, but its not the recommended oil if you know what I mean (hmmm I feel a John Laws pun somewhere in the nether). You can get better protection infact with a lighter oil, since the 60 will be thicker, putting more stress on the oil pump (being a younger engine, tolerences haven't increased, so the oil is simply building up pressure, waiting to get through), thus the oil pump will wear prematurely.

A 60 oil is something you would run in say, the old 92 Astina, 352 thou km's and still going strong, hasn't been rebuilt.

You don't need to run this sort of viscosity, unless you are running a lot of boost, where the thicker oil will help the rings to seal, amoung all the other good crap it will do for such a boost level. Due to the added heat being produced by more horsepower, and thus more heat in the oil, will also reduce the viscosity even more, which will bring the viscosity closer to what the engine wants anyway. Until you get to that level, you're burning more fuel overcoming the added strain on the oil pump, through crank drag, added bearing drag and in general just, more drag.

Er, that's about it. There is no reason to run that oil unless you need to go for a run over the surface of a volcano, or your initials are BCL.

Go a 10w-50 if you have to go thicker than the 40, and you run track days. Royal Purple have one I think. The slight difference will make your oil pump less stressed, and you'll possibly have an engine that will feel younger in a hundred thousand km's time.

Now, don't get me wrong, all of the components of your engine can handle quite a thick oil, since a 15w when cold is a fair amount thicker than say, a 70 grade oil when warm; so the thickness isn't the problem.

Ok.

An oils viscosity becomes lower as it accepts heat, right? Right. But does it really? Well yes to that too, but I'm getting somewhere...

Physically (and overall) an oil definately thins out when you transfere a lot of heat into it, but what about its surface tension? Shear strength? Film strength? "sticky-ness"?. There is actually a part of an oil that becomes more viscous (or stretches out), as it heats up.

Ok imagine this, you have a ball pit, like at a child care facility. Have it filled with balls that are covered in teflon, then fill the pit with a quality oil.

If you drop an anvil in the ball pit, what happens?

It slams to the bottom, goes through the floor and voilently kills the people on the floor below.

Now fill the same pit with ropes, of the same volume as the balls, also with teflon covering them and also fill the rest of the volume with oil.

Drop the anvil, what happens?

The ropes stop the anvil from hitting the bottom.

Why? Because the ropes will be "Pinched" by the force, and since chaos theory and fluid dynamics are both awesome as well as being a bastard, the ropes will quite easily prevent the anvil from hitting the bottom, as they wont be able to move out of each others way.

The balls represent cold oil, the ropes represent a warm oil. As a quality oil is heated, the chains (or springs) stretch out (balls--> ropes), and therefore the overall strength of the oil increases until operating temperature.

You don't need a massively thick oil to have the same effect, you need the right oil; let physics do the rest.

Edited 28/05/08 06:27 AM by Adam

[dule]

I <3 Bananas mate, you sure know your oils. What is the reason Ford recommends the LPG (15 50) for the turbos and not 10-40?