My car which has done 101,000 miles had an oil and filter change a week ago. It's covered about 150 miles since then, 50 of them in London at low speeds, getting warm with frequent cutting-in of the cooling fan.
Today I checked the oil level for the first time since I got it back from the garage man. The light was poor and for a moment I thought the level was too low to register on the dipstick. But no: it was up to the correct level but so spotless that it was invisible in the shadows there. The garage guy, who is very good and reliable, did say that an engine oil flush was a normal part of his oilchange operation. I must say it seems to work very well. The oil is fully synthetic. I'm impressed, wouldn't have believed it really if I hadn't seen it.
Back in the day, before engine oil and fuel were dosed with detergent, an oil flush was thought by some to disturb impacted grot lying around in odd corners with the result sometimes of blocked oilways leading to damage. Things have changed a bit since my young day.
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Must be a petrol motor..........diesel cars have black oil after a few miles.
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I know FB, but I would expect clean oil to take on some colour in a 100,000-mile 2 litre petrol car in 150 miles, especially after getting really hot a few times. That's why I was impressed.
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We have a couple of Japanese petrol cars in the familiy and the oil in those stays pretty clean looking the whole time.
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>> Must be a petrol motor..........diesel cars have black oil after a few miles.
>>
Not all, Mrs O'R had a diesel Saxo where the oil stayed clean for around 1k. I've had the oil stay clean on some diesels for much longer than on others.
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Maybe it's the turbo diesels that blacken the oil. All mine have done it, but the boat engine, one of these
www.betamarine.co.uk/seagoing/beta43/beta43he.html
didn't.
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I changed my oil on Saturday, and the oil came out as clean as it had gone in. So it should have done after only eighty miles. While doing the original change I got distracted by one of those nuisance neighbours who won't stop talking and will never go away. In my haste to get back indoors I didn't let the previous dollop settle before checking the level and adding more, then next day while out and about I noticed the exhaust was smoking rather alarmingly. A check revealed the level to be nearly 1cm above the max. I didn't even attempt to let a bit out and put the drain plug back in as I know from past experience all that results in a lubricated arm from finger to pit and oil all over the floor so I had to bite the bullet and lose the lot, having only a dirty old bowl to use as a drainer.
Fortunately the correct level brought the exhaust emissions back to normal, no leaks anywhere which was a relief as I was worried that the excess pressure might have blown something somewhere.
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That's when a Pela is handy.
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Per Ardua Ad Astra.
I suppose.
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>> That's when a Pela is handy.
>>
One of those devices I keep meaning to invest in but never get round to. With two cars to look after and roughly four oil changes a year I really ought to.
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My vintage engine gets 20-30 drips a minute of 50 grade low detergent oil and by the time it's chucked out into my catch tank, it's black and a heck of a lot less viscous.
Should really have 40 grade oil in the summer, and 30 in the winter, but it was run on 50 since the mid 60s so I've not bothered changing.
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>> vintage engine gets 20-30 drips a minute of 50 grade low detergent oil
Drip feed, no pressurization even for the bottom end Sp?
I know some vintage cars have drip-feed, total-loss lubrication, but I've never understood fully how it could all work, crankshaft, main and big-end bearings, pistons and valve gear...
I had a VW once with a felt wick, which had to be oiled regularly, lubricating a cam... but only inside the distributor, so not for anything mechanically serious.
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Drip feed, no pressurization even for the bottom end Sp?
Yup, that's correct. The crank bearings are a ball race at one end, and a roller race at the other. You can only make it work with races, white metal bearings and you need pressure.
I always err on the side of over oiling, on the premise that oil is cheap, rebuilds aren't. I always start the oil pump, which is manual, before turning anything else on too.
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"the boat engine"
Oooh - that's a nice lump; what boat have you got it in?
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No I haven't a yacht. We had a 20% share in a narrow boat with one of those in it.
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>>We had a 20% share in a narrow boat with one of those in it.
What's wrong with a single cylinder, diesel 'thumper', as traditional?
I had experience of an engine recovered from a cement mixer, many years ago (someone had to hold the kettle down to prevent it walking off the burner).
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>> >>We had a 20% share in a narrow boat with one of those in it.
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>> What's wrong with a single cylinder, diesel 'thumper', as traditional?
>>
Absolutely nothing bt, though I'd have preferred a Gardner 2LW in its own engine room. But those modern diesels can go under the rear deck leaving more space for other stuff, as well as being cheaper.
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>>, though I'd have preferred a Gardner (2LW) in its own engine room.<<
Which is under the bonnet of a 'proper' lorry:)
Nothing sounded better.
Pat
Last edited by: Pat on Tue 1 Apr 14 at 05:23
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>> "the boat engine"
>>
>> Oooh - that's a nice lump; what boat have you got it in?
Sorry, I misled you Haywain by linking to the seagoing version - it was this Beta 43 -
www.betamarine.co.uk/inland/Beta_43/beta43kc.html
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>> Sorry, I misled you Haywain by linking to the seagoing version - it was this
>> Beta 43 -
>>
>> www.betamarine.co.uk/inland/Beta_43/beta43kc.html
>>
Do you really need 43 gee gees for a narrer boat?
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>> Do you really need 43 gee gees for a narrer boat?
In the same way as you need 150bhp for a family car - almost never.
You can't use it on the average canal, the water isn't deep enough. The engine will rev to say 3000rpm. You can do 3+mph with not much over 1000, and even if you give it full throttle it won't go much above 4, it will just make a lot of noise and use loads more fuel. It will also suck the boat down as the prop can't find enough water, and stir up the canal bed - before very long you'll almost certainly have a rope, a fertiliser bag, and in an urban area an old carpet and maybe a tyre stuck on the prop and spend half an hour down the weed hatch cutting it off.
But get on a river with some deeper water and you can wind it up a bit, and our 60' boat with that engine did 8mph or more on deep water - it really needs to be capable of that if you want to cover all the inland waterways. If there's much current you also need more power to manoeuvre or even to make headway upstream (on a river you generally have to point the boat upstream to moor it, they don't really steer in reverse).
As you can see Beta Marine suggest the 43 rather than the 38 for a 60' boat.
www.betamarine.co.uk/inland/inland_engine_guidelines.html
You also need the engine to stop the boat.
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"In the same way as you need 150bhp for a family car - almost never."
Thanks, Manatee. I've done some narrow-boating, but only hired them - our longest being 55'. A friend, with whom I hadn't been in close contact for some years, informed me last year that he'd acquired a boat. I said "I'll show you mine if you show me yours". I sent him a photo of my 16' Old Town Penobscot canoe - he replied with his Jeanneau 645 fishing boat with a 115hp Honda outboard. He tells me that the engine is basically the same as a Honda Civic.
We've been out fishing on the North Sea many times since and he tells me that the power of the engine is necessary for tide-fighting situations. Having witnessed a couple of these occasions, I can appreciate what he means. He said that, if the boat were used on inland waterways, 10 hp or so would be fine.
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A friend in Australia had a long unused tractor that we decided to fire up, he even had the users manual for it. The crankshaft had cups which scooped oil from the sump to splash lubricate the main and big end bearings and it had Magneto ignition.
One of these.
www.tractordata.co.uk/fordson_to_1950/pages/fordson_e27n_tvo_1947/
It took a few hours but we got it going. The main problem was rust in the bottom of the fuel tank.
Last edited by: Uncle Albert on Tue 1 Apr 14 at 16:39
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Splash lubrication. Quite a few early lawnmowers had this, I used a series one Suffolk Punch for a few years, only scrapping it when it became to lethal to use. I suppose I could have restored it, but the grease nipples live on as replacements on the valvegear of the afore mentioned vintage engine, a J.A.P LTOW.
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Honda's six cylinder 250cc GP bike used splash lubrication and the riders and mechanics were instructed to keep the revs above 11k or the top end wouldn't get enough oil. I'm not sure why they didn't have an oil pump, possibly because there was no where to squeeze one in to such a small lump alongside all the other gubbins.
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The crank is a roller bearing outfit, so may well have relied on splash from the wet sump. I used to have a rebuild article on the 250 6, but it's gone adrift in the recent move. However, I think it must have an oil pump at least in the later versions, for the valve gear, as I have seen mention of oil ways, and certainly the engine had an oil cooler. I will continue to look....
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My father had an old boat with a Ford model T engine.
That I think had splash lubrication and whitemetal bearings, so it can be done.
It didn't like being tilted to accommodate the propellor shaft angle, so the rear plug oiled up very quickly.
It also had a home-made parafin TVO conversion which didn't really burn the fuel properly.
Unsurprisingly the oil was always thick black.
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Yes, T's don't have an oil pump, although with some of them being as low a compression ratio of 3.98:1, you've not got the bearing stress that later engines have. Bet my lawn mower had more!
As for my earlier post being wrong, occupational hazard really the moment you talk about engineering history as however mad the idea, someone will have tried it and probably before the example you quote too.
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Technically, there's no need for pressure for plain bearings.
The bearing generates its own pressure by virtue of the geometry and the motion, and so, the only need is for there to be sufficient oil to be present.
The pressure generated by the geometry and the motion is far higher than the pump's pressure, and oil pumps in engines are really only there to make sure that oil is flowing to all the bearings.
Engine oil pumps have to be sized to provide sufficient oil in the worst case - very hot engine, ticking over. In all other cases, the oil pump will provide too much oil, there will be a back pressure which is recorded on the gauge.
When bearings wear, the oil pump no longer keeps up, and the pressure reduces, but people have interpreted this to mean that the bearings need oil pressure - they don't!
Modern engines, like Ford's Ecoboost have a very clever variable displacement pump which reduces the power losses involved in pumps producing the excess oil pressure which is not necessary.
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>>diesel cars have black oil after a few miles<<
Mine - Honda 2.2 IDTEC - doesn't.
5k kilometres since the January service and it is still only just tinged with amber.
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Just over 300 miles since the oil change. Level still well up but the oil has acquied a little colour.
50 miles were in London, 100 were getting there and back and most of the rest was short journeys round and about, 10 miles or less. 34mpg, not bad but could be bettered... watch this space.
Last edited by: Armel Coussine on Tue 8 Apr 14 at 20:32
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I am so glad that - despite my advancing years - that I am not at all anally retentive about the colour of my car's oil, the colour of my waste products nor the colour of my eyes when I wake up.
Worrying about such things is a sure sign of senescence ..
:-)
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My Audi A8L TDI 3.0tdi doesn't blacken the oil.
It's more like a petrol in that respect and it's a 2006 model and did have a DPF but hardly the latest ECO model. I also changed the injectors for later Bluemotion units with 7-hole nozzles which may help.
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>> Worrying about such things is a sure sign of senescence ..
Perhaps it is madf. But merely noticing them is a sign of alertness and intelligence. 'Anally retentive' indeed! That is only too likely to make your waste products an odd colour.
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The only diesel I've had that didn't black its oil within minutes was the 1.9dCi Renault engine in the Scenic. but then that's also the only non-DPF equipped diesel that you couldn't make produce visible smoke from the tailpipe however hard you drove it. A very clean burning engine.
The BMW N47 in the 320d may not either, but without a dipstick, it's hard to tell. That poor thing will have done best part of 60k on just two oil changes when it goes back, so it's probably on borrowed time now anyway. I can't imagine what's in there at the end of a stint is much good for anything, but it keeps the lease costs down I guess.
Last edited by: DP on Wed 9 Apr 14 at 14:55
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Clean oil - Falkirk Bairn
