Safe Speed Forums

Yet you go zooming about on race tracks! Why not drive more slowly, as I do, if you care about the risk?
You can practically do without brakes, if you drive slowly enough!

No, you're both talking soft . When you use bangernomics, it makes no sense to use dear oil. Do you think I am made of money?

PS: Oops, that could cause offence, so please forgive me. But you have to see that there's a cost curve here. Too
little spend on maintenance, and the car gives up on me too soon. Too much, and I end up feeling like an
"enthusiast"... so I've asked for expert advice. Is it really worth putting dear oil in a banger?

If you do low mileage, I.e. Do half the service mileage a year then, use cheap
oil of the correct rating but change every year or use a high quality one and go for two.

Oil is contaminated by combustion products, water and the volatiles can be vented off if you get the engine hot enough for long enough. Short runs lead to a build up so the oil should be changed more often. A high quality oil will cope better than a cheap one so it depends what your time is worth to you.

The other point is that on older worn engines a cheap oil more often, particularly if it needs topping up, can be best.

The filter on the TVR gets changed every other oil change, but then it does not do more than 1000 miles between changes.

_________________
Driving fast is for a particular time and place, I can do it I just only do it occasionally because I am a gentleman.
- James May

I think my new tractor has to have synthetic oil to get to the 400 hour service interval, I believe not all oils handle the long drain periods. The car doesn't do that many miles. Depending on how generous I am feeling toward one MR G. Brown esq depends on how many miles I do. It is normally just over the service interval with alot of short journeys. I reckon to get it serviced once a year with the MOT and change the oil every 6 months. The car has finished depreciating, but I want several more reliable years out of her yet.

OK. My mistake, I forgot there might be some folk out there that might prefer to change an engine rather than fork out £20 for a new cam belt!



Not quite the same game but pretty close to it. However, I think we're looking at it from opposite ends of the telescope! I buy a big executive barge that I like and that seems to be fairly plentiful but is close to the end of its working life. I pay a few hundred quid. I then mantain it pretty well - always using either good quality pattern parts or even genuine ones on occasions. When it gets too much for me (either because it rots or because it's going to need something too expensive), I buy another one as close to it as possible in age and model and I break the previous one - keeping all the genuine spares "in stock" for when the next car needs them. I cut the shell in half and take each half down to the scrap man on my trailer - where, until recently, I could recoup a substantial percentage of my original investment! Unfortunately, the necessity for a "Certificate of Destruction" from DVLA might stop that game in the future. That's how I know that the dreaded computers aren't necessarily the problem you think they are - I have cardboard boxes full of ECUs in the loft that I've never needed (but always worried that I might)!

This isn't "bangernomics" as you describe - but it does involve bangers! If I like the car I'll splash out on "toys" for it (like a leather interior from another scrapper) that aren't actually essential to keep it on the road. The process is phenomenally labour-intensive, so I don't expect it to catch on, but I enjoy maintaining cars so I don't need to put a cost on my time (though people keep telling me that I need to)! I have good facilities to work on the car and I end up with a half-tidy car of the type that I could only DREAM of being able to run otherwise.

I think you can't make out what I want because I DON'T want more durable cars!!!!! What's more, I'd be careful what you wish for if I were you! IF you got your wish, people would hang on to their cars for longer, because they'd be more durable so there would be no reason to get rid of them, so you and I wouldn't be able to pick up "bangers" for a couple of hundred quid! By the time they got down to that sort of value, they'd be absolutely stuffed! Think about it. Typcial cars tend to have a production life of 10 years or so. After that, the manufacturer is unlikely to keep making spares for more than another 10 years after the last one rolls off the line. If they started lasting (say) 15 years before people scrapped them, I'd struggle to find spares to keep mine on the road.

Not only that, if you DID get the improvements in simplicity that you want, people would go back to scrapping cars because of terminal rust again (or whatever the new weakest link in the chain became). Either way, people won't throw away usable cars of the sort that we loof for!

Now there are some jobs that I DON'T enjoy on cars and welding up rusty ones is definitely one of them! If I had to choose between strolling out to the garage in my T shirt and plugging in a few "black boxes" until it worked again or grovelling about for hours getting covered in grinding dust, rust, sparks, weld spatter and underseal...

...I know what I'd choose!!!!!!!!!!!

So as far as I'm concerned, the STATUS QUO is JUST fine for me! (They did some cracking songs )! Long Live complex, unreliable, expensive to repair (but structurally sound) cars! - That's what I say!

Since you mention it..

My younger brother has an old Fiat Coupe Turbo (20Valve)

He bought it for a song because it needed a new engine.

Astonishingly it is cheaper to fit a new (Non fiat) engine (CW Timing belt) than it is to get Fiat to change the timing belt on its own!!!

_________________
"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Yeah. Maybe the easiest thing to do is to change the whole car with the engine and the cam belt. That's what the makers would like; but if they fitted proper cam chains, we wouldn't need to do any of this nonsense.

I never underestimate the power of vanity. It is vanity, not need, that drives the economy higher.

Ah! So all this prattle about making cars more reliable and longer-lasting is twaddle anyway because people will still scrap them just because they want a new one?!

Oh, if only! The first car I ever bought was a Citroen DS and the timing chain tensioner went. That was a 3 day job even for a dealer! That car had me reduced to tears on many occasions!

Huh???!!!!

Is there another non-Fiat engine that just happens to fit in the hole and mates up to the Fiat gearbox and whose senosrs "talk" to all the Fiat instruments???

Sorry, badly put.

By that I meant non-fiat OEM recon, not Non-Fiat as in ford

replacing the cam belt (officially) is an engine out job, for which the $tealer will charge plenty!

(you can do it in situ as long as you are prepared to cut off the covers and therefore leave the belt unprotected afterwards! but its still a PITA)

My brother found a place in London that provided an inexpensive recon engine and fitted it (actually It was a bit too cheap! and I was a bit concerned, but it seems to be working just fine and the job was done several years ago) for rather less than the fiat dealer would have charged for a cambelt change alone!

_________________
"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Ahhhh! Comprendo!!!

OK, I have to admit that I'm not even going to TRY and defend the industry where that's concerned! Having already once suffered a bad experience with an Italian cam belt myself, I do not feel kindly disposed towards the Alfa-Fiat group of companies to start with, but to make a service item like a cam belt so difficult to change is, of coure, unforgivable!!!

Some years ago I was in a position to "test"synthetic (mobil 1 in this case). I ran a Rover 213 for 150,000 miles (until the body fell apart) with 30,000 mile oil changes (from memory the filter was probably changed as well). At the final stages the engine ran exactly he same as it had always ran, perfect and 40 mpg.

And this myth about synthetic not being suitable for classic cars with large tolerances, absolute rubbish. Sure, there's no point in putting synthetic into a worn engine - but a rebuilt unit is no problem. By fitting valve stem seals to a Triumph herald engine, and using Mobil 1 after running in (don't put synthetic into a rebuilt unit!), it used to do 4000 miles to the pint of oil and phenomenal MPG. On another occasion a Herald engine was dismantled after 15,000 miles (from a rebuild) after Mobil 1, it looked like new.

Those of you who want to use dinosaur stuff are welcome to, synthetic does work - and you can have extended oil changes.

I used to have a mark 1 XR2 which I bought when it only had about 4000 miles on it. I then ran it using Ford's own motor oil and changing it and the filter every 6000 miles. After about 60,000 miles I stripped the engine to have it rebored, lightened, balanced, new cam etc. (to improve it's performance). The guy doing the job couldn't believe how little wear the original crank, cam etc was showing. Ford's oil at the time was quite cheap, I don't know if it's still the same spec but I'm tempted to start using it again.

_________________
My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

I also ran a "proper" escort for many years, and it had a really tight engine that burned no oil, even after 200,000 miles.
They were absolutely unbreakable.

Do you have some more info on that? I've heard all sorts of tales about fully synthetic oils being (at best) a waste of money and at worst, actually detrimental to older designs of engine. You certainly don't have to "Google" very far to find similar stories. Certainly when the technical drector of the company making valvoline says thinsg like:

"...So why shouldn't everyone use them? Answer: These oils are expensive and not every engine needs them. In fact, there may be some features that your classic car engine needs that the synthetics don't have. Again, follow your owner's manual."

It starts alarm bells ringing in my litle brain"

(full article here):

http://www.uk-classic-cars.com/tips/classic-car-oil.php



I'd like to put this one to bed once and for all though - with some proper, objective and controlled research. My old Alfa has done nearly a quarter of a million miles on straight (and relatively cheap!) mineral oil. It's burning a bit now but I can forgive it that. Whether or not I'd have been better off with synthetic is something I'll never know. As it needs 7.5 litres for an oil change, I've probably saved more than the cost of another car by not using Mobil 1!

"follow the owners manual"

Not a helpful suggestion - much better would be follow the advice of people in the trade who have tried various things rather than listening to scare stories.

I dealt with Triumph engines and transmissions for many years - sometimes the owners manuals were useful, othertimes they weren't - I simply tried things out in my own cars as I could rebuild anything.....

Engines. Triumph engines suffer from a lack of valve stem seals (we are talking Standard 10, Herald, Spitfire, TR5/6, 2500 etc etc). A rebuilt engine with stem seals will use little oil and can do 25,000 mile changes on Mobil 1. However the engine MUST NOT be run in on synthetic, it's too good and doesn't allow the rings to be bed in, and there isn't much point in using a synthetic in an old engine. Triumph 1500 engines suffer badly from crank bearing wear and poor quality camshaft material - rebuild a 1500 engine with quality crank bearings, stem seals, and a reground/hardened camshaft (also exhaust valve seat inserts), use synthetic and it will last longer than an original unit.

Gearboxes and diffs. Things may have changed but in my day to make a gear oil to meet GL5 spec it had to have sulpher and phospherous additives - these additives attack copper and the shims used in diffs would literally disintegrate hence ONLY GL4 could be used. Gearboxes (even overdrive ones) didn't seem to suffer - so you could use GL5. To save having different gear oils I found a synthetic GL4 from Unipart that would do anything.

So, to get back to the original point, owners manuals are of little use as they were written years ago. Listen to people in the trade who are in a position to have tried things, and decide who you can trust!

Yes, but you would have thought that the Technical Director of a company making a well-regarded product like Valvoline could also be thought of as being "in the trade"?! I'm especially inclined to believe people like him whose companies also make a synthetic product because he's doing himself out of business by saying it! (unless, of course, there's more money in mineral oil for them)!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying synthetic oils are worthless - if I had a modern turbo car that did a lot of hard work like track days, I wouldn't consider anything else! What I AM saying is that I need to get to the bottom of the assertion that they might actually be at best of no benefit and at worst slightly harmful to older designs of engine.

You say:

"...rebuild a 1500 engine with quality crank bearings, stem seals, and a reground/hardened camshaft (also exhaust valve seat inserts), use synthetic and it will last longer than an original unit."

But to be honest, if you did that, I'd expect it to last a lot longer than the original unit on ordinary mineral oil too!

I'm a bit late joining this argument ... errmmm .... discussion but...

You need to look at the construction of the oil filter, specifically at the safeguard which is in place in case the filter gets clogged. Basically, if the pressure gets beyond a certain point the oil bypasses the filter entirely so you are pumping unfiltered oil around the engine (well, it's better than no oil).

I doubt you need to change it every time but like you say.... who knows?