Good non-synthetic oil

[lukevl]

Hey all I'm a bit reluctant to run a fully synthetic on such a young motor (500km) and I was wondering what people think a good non synthetic oil is to handle decent HP. Preferably 5 or 10W and anywhere from 40-50

Cheers

[CWR]

Apparently magnatec is okay for newish engines and should be available in the correct grades although it is a semi.

[Uncle Arthur]

A diesel oil of some sort?

[lukevl]

Chris- Yeah I know a few guys using that with ok HP and no engine destruction. Might look into it.

Richard- Sounds a bit far out for me. lol

[TK]

Penrite is always good.

But what motor is it?

A flat tappet pushrod motor should never have synthetic tipped into it.

TK

[carazy]

Penrite is always good.

But what motor is it?

A flat tappet pushrod motor should never have synthetic tipped into it.

TK

Why?

Oh and while were here.. what oils good for the XR6 Turbo?
I know nothing about oils.

[lukevl]

I will look into the Penrite Tony. Thanks.

RB30/25.

[PLAYA]

Ulx?

[XEFalconUte]

I like Penrite also.

For breakin with a flat tappet cam you need to look for an oil with a high zinc level. I'm also interested in why no full synth oil in flat tappet engine TK?

have fun

Simon

[slo360]

Shell rotella for bulk zinc content, as recommended By Comp/Crane cames for flat tappets. Id steer clear of penrite unless you stole the car, and Synth(mob 1 5w30 in mine and others) is fine in flat tappet combos (upto 150lbs seat at least) after ring break in is finalised, one engine of not is a 360,solid 540lift, atleast 9 winton sprint days, 20-25 drag meets and around 50,000street klms , still clean, same bearings, still fantastic O/P hot and cold, IMHO the word "synthetic" scares/worries some people, but over the next few years even oils like Rotella designed for heavy diesel use will have the zinc levels greatly reduced so sooner or later flat tappet guys will have to face the inevitable of either spending big on specialy made "race bred oils" or going synthetic.

cheers

[TK]

Fuck all zinc in synthetic means it's no good for sliding iron/iron contact - flat tappet cams wear out real quick.
Something an old bastard tuner told me a while ago - don't spend up big on oil, it still gets shit in it & needs to be changed, better off buying a decent oil that comes at a reasonable cost & changing it more often - will cost the same or less & be better for the engine than leaving mega $$ oil in longer.

Haven't looked at the shell rotella, sounds ok if the price is right.

I like penrite because it is a good quality mineral oil, I have used it in all my own engines & recommend it to all of my customers with flat tappet engines.
Engines running it always come apart clean, with fuck all wear on the bearings & nicely bedded cams - enough proof for me that it's good stuff.
Holds good pressure when hot too, not as good as a synthetic, but real good for a mineral.

slo360 - have you used penrite? - had a bad experience maybe? - why bag a good product for no reason?
I'll stand by penrite, I can't think of a better oil for the price - & it's aussie made.

TK

[Uncle Arthur]

Twin cam engines with bucket cam followers would be prone to wear then without a high zinc oil? Or synthetic?

[TK]

Nah, no problem there, ohc engines cams are almost always cast steel & often case hardened, followers are also very hard.
Old V8's use cast iron cams & iron followers, both relatively soft - they work harden during bed in, which is why initial startup & the first 1/2hr of running are so critical to the life of a flat tappet V8 cam - overload the cam or underlubricate it in the first 20 minutes & it'll die before it's life even begins, putting a fair amount of ground up cast iron through the motor & murdering the bearings & scoring the bores - not pretty.

TK

[Passion-Fingers]

Don't OHC motors usually have MUCH less valve spring pressure?

TK, what oil have you had good success with for the initial start up of solid cammed old school v8's? A mate of mine has just started rebuilding his 460BBF and is freaking out a bit about running in his new cam.

Good idea to use the old set of heads with lower valve spring pressure and then after the breakin put the good set of heads on?

[TK]

Softer single springs often run out of travel with a mech cam - coil bind will kill the cam in seconds.
Usual process is to leave the inner springs out of the double valve springs, & leave out any shims fitted to get the spring installed heights right.
A basic oil is all that is needed, any semi-decent 20/50 will do, but add a bottle of crane cams break in lube.
If possible fire up the engine with a known good carb (I have a 650dp holley I loan to customers for inital startups) & a known good ignition, static time the ignition carefully - the reason for all this is to make sure the motor fires quickly, without having to crank it on the starter & having it fire & die multiple times while you're trying to figure out whats going wrong.
For a ford or chev you can prime the oiling system by removing the dissy & spinning up the oil pump drive with a drill untill oil pressure is showing on the guage, for a holden it's not so simple, you can't spin up the pump without cranking the engine, you can prime the system by pumping oil in through the oil pressure guage sender hole.
For holdens I pack the pump full of moly assembly lube during assembly so it can suck as hard as possible.
Leave out the spark plugs & crank the engine till oil pressure registers on the guage, refit the plugs & fire the engine.
To bed the cam hold the revs between 2000-2500rpm for 20 minutes, bliping the throttle from time to time to keep the oil moving.
After initial bed in refit the inner springs & any shims, fire the engine again & do a final bed with full spring pressure for another 20 min.
After bed in change the oil & filter & dump in another bottle of cam break in lube.
Run it around using usuall running in procedures for 500km, then dump the oil again & fill with a good mineral oil.
Change oil again at 1000km.
Al done.

The above may seem like overkill, but a dead cam can kill an engine - anything you can do to be certain the cam will survive is worth doing.

TK

[lukevl]

Modern OHC motors with cam buckets are still cast iron but they are chill cast mostly making them extremely hard. The problem with the pushrod stuff is the very small contact area due to the lobes being tapered and the followers being radiused. The contact area on start-up is theoretically a knife edge and the whole point of run in is to widen that area to a point where it will survive. This can obviously go horribly wrong and TK's procedure listed above should be followed stringently. If not, a follower can stop rotating and if it does it will wipe out a lobe in under a minute.

[lukevl]

Passion-fingers - Yes OHC motors have less spring pressure, which means less mass to lift, and a contact area that would be 5 times the width.

[slo360]

slo360 - have you used penrite? - had a bad experience maybe? - why bag a good product for no reason?
I'll stand by penrite, I can't think of a better oil for the price - & it's aussie made.

TK, yes i have used Penrite, and until around a year ago its what we still used at work. I personaly had issues with it thinning too much even when compared to other mineral oils whereby even after a few laps of winton oil pressure had dropped markedly, the engine also consumed more oil after 5000klms street use than it did prior to or after using it, it also annoyed me greatly that its so thick when cold(grade for grade) that it pegs the neddle on a 100psi oil pressure gauge just off idle when cold, at work we had problems with alot of chrysler hemi based cars running hyd/flat tappet cams getting rattly lifters when hot due to how much it thins out, we have since changed to Valvoline 20/50 as our base oil and have seen vast improvements in the cars we see for normal servicing, though we typicaly run castrol edge or mobil1 in the more performance orientated stuff.


Fuck all zinc in synthetic means it's no good for sliding iron/iron contact - flat tappet cams wear out real quick.

As a better base oil synth can make do with less, but keep in mind that ZDDP levels arent a result of which type of oil it is, its added to both as required , and in most oils whether S or M the levels are being reduced in both for emission compliance, its only going to get harder to find good oil, even the diesel oils will be getting reduced in leaps and bounds over the coming months/years.

Tk have you ever seen a solid flat tappet cam fail because of synth, as to cam/tappet wear on due to synth, even comp and crane cant fault synth to the point that the last 3 comps i bought i was advised each time that synth is fine after break in, but i still use running in oil and a bottle of crane additive for the cam break in, after that its all synth these days.

As to service interval, i am forced to run synth for track days as most all mineral oils will cause damage when run at temps beyond 300f, atleast synth still works when its that hot, paying an extra 20-30bucks to protect the investment in these situations is fine by me, although i see the old tuners point, when back in the day they ran them soooo rich the oil was flogged after a week it makes sense to run Kmart oil, but in this day and age of decent tuning and a dyno on every corner theres no reason to change it every month.

cheers

[TK]

I've seem no such problems with penrite, from my experience it holds pressure when hot better than most run of the mill oils, pressure when cold is limited by the relief valve in the pump - if it's set to relieve at 70psi it should do so, irrespective of the grade or temp of the oil (well, almost - thicker oils will bump pressure a little, but not heaps).
I use HPR30 in my own engine, I'm not keen to use anything else - it's good & I have no reason to believe anything else will give any worthwile advantage.
The only time I would use a synth in a flat tappet V8 application is for circuit work where oil temp can get very high - but even then with a decent oil capacity & a good cooler it's often not neccessary.
Yes, I have seen cams with too much wear for their milage that have been run with synth - it won't cause a failure but it will reduce the lifespan of the cam, nose wear is definately increased. I was personally informed on 2 occasions by the guys from Crane Technology Australia that they do not reccommend the use of full synthetic oils with flat tappet cams - who am I to argue?
Any oil used in a carb application on the street will end up with fuel in it, not so much carbon, low load on the rings during daily driving & the fact that carbs are never quite right results in more fuel getting past the rings & into the sump than it would with a modern, smaller capacity engine - a good oil change interval in these circumstances is 5000km, irrespective of the oil used - me, I'd rather pay $60 for an oil that I know works just fine than pay $120 for oil with no real advantage.
(BTW - if you're getting a lot of carbon 'black' in oil then thats due to blowby on load - rings are not doing their job as well as they should be, a torque plated & plaeto (speeling?) honed bore with moly or steel rings should not dirty up the oil excessively between changes).
Have you seen the varnish buildup that engines run on valvoline have after 50000 kays? - not nice - penrite engines always come apart clean.

We may have to agree to disagree on a few points here, everyone has their own opinion and different experiences with different oils, but in the end if it's working for you than why change what you're doing.

TK

[PLAYA]

hey TK i only have experience with the motors i look after at home but my oil is always black and the motors are in good condition to my knowlege?

[jmac]

fwiw I can to some degree back up what slo360 is saying, and I'll also mention that hemi oil pumps are pieces of shit, and it wouldn't surprise me if their near seizure 'all in a days work' design isn't predominantly responsible for the oil breaking down.

In general, oil companies have expressed (subtley) that friction modifiers don't stand up well to very high temps, and arguably before riong bed in, a lot of heat will be exposed to some of the oil, so typically one should probably favour a monograde oil for the earliest stages of running in, and change it early, and perhaps a second time, before the 'full time' oil goes in there. I'm not going to rip off his whole conversation, but if you could be bothered google aus.cars and the recent subject 'oils ain't oils' as it, and the hemi issue gets discussed to some degree. Look for posts by a bloke called John H..

You're not going to see much zinc in new oils as it, and something else (i forget) apparently affects cat convertors, so it's allowable %age is fuck all now.

Slo - I've given mobil synth 10W40 a go recently in the tow car, and whilst it's not silent (and I'm too lazy to pull the sump and get at the oil pump, but it does seem to be due to lower pressure from old engine (as in another 'put it in for now, and ends up staying 5-10 years) and tired relief valve spring) it's actually betterr than most 20w50 oil.

of course I could also go on about rebuilt engines and cam and lifter problems, but slo360 knows a bit about the in-joke I'm referring to here. In a nutshell, if you lost lobe or two, it's possibly not due to the oil or anything the builder or owner did, not that some will ever admit to their incompetance.....

[adamRSLC]

I also used HPR30 in my carby 5ltr at track days and was a little worried about hot oil pressures droping a fair bit ( also has to do with bearing clearences ) but on advice from a penrite representative i switched to the "compitition oils" 25/60 and had a marked improvement on hot oil pressures and the general condition of the oil after a few track days.

Its not a synthetic oil as they didnt recommend it for my car (flat tappet cam) but offers similiar performance.

adam

[Whistler]

My mechanic recomended pure synthetic oil for my VR4 twin cam turbo, i dont know enything much about oils so can you tell me what to use, because my mechanic is retired and i have to do everything myself

[67camaro]

I have read all about Rotella, but didn't think Shell sold it in Oz?

[jmac]

http://www.datateck.com.au/lube/mobil_au/datapage.asp?Section=1&Make=44&Model=1355

would help a bit, but _really_ you need to look at the owners manual, or if need be the factory (i.e. not a gregories) workshop manual. they'll list not only brands they have tested the engines with, but more specifically the 'grade' of oil.

If I had to make a guess, I'd look at mobil 1 in 15w 50 but I'd suggest trying something like the 0w 40 as well, and I'd _absolutely_ put those two well behind anything in the manual that's recommended.

As nice as mobil 1 is, it has a fair bit of vi improvers, not nec. a great thing.

Hey slo360 - where the heck are you located these days? Justin has tried a few times to get in contact with you for this and that, I've also had a couple of friends enquire about chassis work, but had to send them elsewhere as I had no contact (pm if preferred)

[bigmuz]

http://www.shell.com/static/au-en/downloads/lubricants/product_data_guide/shell_pdg_automotive_products.pdf

Rotella is for GM diesels. They have LOTS of sliding surfaces, I guess that bodes well for flat tappet etc etc.

[PHULL]

wonder how thats stuff would go in a rotary?