I'm posting this as a public service for all the people out there with oil questions and confusion over conventional, synthetic, and pure synthetic motor oils. In this post, there will be basic information regarding the different types and grades of engine oil, and (proper) basic operations and maintenance of the internal combustion engine.
I can not take any responsibility for writing any of this, it was all taken from http://www.carbibles.com, and proper thanks go out to the author, Chris Longhurst, for this plethora of information. The rest of this post will be an abridged version of The Engine Oil Bible, please follow the link to view the full text in its original form.
Chris has also informed me that this text is ever changing. This specific excerpt was taken on April 16th, 2008. For up to date information, again, please visit his website over at www.carbibles.com. For an up to date changelog, visit http://www.carbibles.com/whatsnew.html.
What does my oil actually do?
An engine oil's job is primarily to stop all the metal surfaces in your engine from grinding together and tearing themselves apart from friction whilst transferring heat away from the combustion cycle. Engine oil must also be able to hold all the nasty by-products of combustion, such as silica (silicon oxide) and acids in suspension. It cleans the engine of these chemicals and build-ups, and keeps the moving parts coated in oil. Finally, engine oil minimises the exposure to oxygen and thus oxidation at higher temperatures. It does all of these things under tremendous heat and pressure.
Sludge: Black Death for the 21st Century
There's a snappy new moniker for Black Death now, and it's called sludge. The cause is the same as Black Death and it seems to be regardless of maintenance or mileage. The chemical compounds in engine oils break down over time due to prolonged exposure to high temperatures and poor maintenance habits. When the oil oxidises, the additives separate from the oil and begin to chemically break down and solidify, leading to the baked-on oil deposits turning gelatinous, and that nasty compound is what is lovingly referred to nowadays as sludge. It's like black yoghurt. What doesn't help is that modern engines, due to packaging, have smaller sumps than in the "good old days" and so hold less oil. This means that the oil that is present in the engine can't hold as much crap (for want of a better word) and can lead to earlier chemical breakdown.
The most common factor in sludge buildup is mineral oils combined with a lack of maintenance by the car owner combined with harsh driving conditions. But this isn't true in all cases. For some reason, a 2005 Consumer Reports article discovered that some engines from Audi, Chrysler, Saab, Toyota, and Volkswagen appear prone to sludge almost no matter how often the oil is changed.
What does sludge look like?
Below are two of those photos. On the top is what the cam case should look like in a well maintained engine when photographed through the oil filler cap. On the bottom is what the same type of engine looks like when suffering sludge buildup.
Picture credits: Ketchup from "bimmerfest" forums
In this example, the consensus was that the sludge buildup was caused by an overheating engine, oil that hadn't been changed for 20,000 miles of stop-go city driving, a lot of cold starts and a period of about 12 months in storage without an oil change. Most of this happened before the current owner got it.
When is sludge not sludge?
Easy. When it's an oil and water emulsion from a leaking or blown head gasket. If this happens, you get a whitish cream coloured sludge on the inside of the oil filler cap. The filler cap is typically cooler than the rest of the cam case and so the oil/water mix tends to condense there. So if you take the oil filler cap off and it looks like it's covered in vanilla yoghurt or mayonnaise, you've got a blown head gasket. A surefire way to confirm this is if your oil level is going up and your coolant level is going down. The coolant is getting through the breaks in the head gasket and mixing with the oil. When it gets to the sump it separates out and the oil floats on top. A slightly more accurate way to check for this condition is to use a combustion leak tester, or block tester. If you're in America, NAPA sell them for about $45 (part #BK 7001006). If you're in England, Sealey sell them for about £70 (model number VS0061). Combustion leak testers are basically a turkey baster filled with PH liquid, with a non-return valve at the bottom. To use one, run your engine for a few minutes until its warm (not hot) then turn it off. Use a protective glove (like an oven glove) and take the radiator or reservoir cap off. Plug the bottom of the combustion leak tester into the hole and squeeze the rubber bulb on top. It will suck air from the top of the coolant through the non-return valve and bubble it through the PH liquid. If the liquid changes colour (normally blue to yellow), it means there is combustion gas in the coolant, which means a head gasket leak.
There is one other possible cause for this yellow goop : a blocked scavenger hose. Most engines have a hose which comes off the cam cover and returns to the engine block somewhere via a vacuum line. This is the scavenger hose which scavenges oil vapour and gasses that build up in the cam cover. If it's blocked you can end up with a buildup of condensation inside the cam cover, which can manifest itself as the yellow goop inside the filler cap.
Mineral or synthetic?
Mineral oils are based on oil that comes from dear old Mother Earth which has been refined. Synthetic oils are entirely concocted by chemists wearing white lab coats in oil company laboratories. For more info, see the section on synthetics further down the page. The only other type is semi-synthetic, sometimes called premium, which is a blend of the two. It is safe to mix the different types, but it's wiser to switch completely to a new type rather than mixing.
Synthetics
Despite their name, most synthetic derived motor oils (ie Mobil 1, Castrol Formula RS etc ) are actually derived from mineral oils - they are mostly Polyalphaolifins and these come from the purest part of the mineral oil refraction process, the gas. PAO oils will mix with normal mineral oils which means Joe public can add synthetic to his mineral, or mineral to his synthetic without his car engine seizing up. (In truth, Mobil 1 is actually made by reformulating ethanol).
The most stable bases are polyol-ester (not polyester, you fool). When I say 'stable' I mean 'less likely to react adversely with other compounds.' Synthetic oil bases tend not to contain reactive carbon atoms for this reason. Reactive carbon has a tendency to combine with oxygen creating an acid. As you can imagine, in an oil, this would be A Bad Thing. So think of synthetic oils as custom-built oils. They're designed to do the job efficiently but without any of the excess baggage that can accompany mineral based oils.
Pure synthetics
Pure synthetic oils (polyalkyleneglycol) are the types used almost exclusively within the industrial sector in polyglycol gearbox oils for heavily loaded gearboxes. These are typically concocted by intelligent blokes in white lab coats. These chaps break apart the molecules that make up a variety of substances, like vegetable and animal oils, and then recombine the individual atoms that make up those molecules to build new, synthetic molecules. This process allows the chemists to actually "fine tune" the molecules as they build them. Clever stuff. But Polyglycols don't mix with normal mineral oils.
Mixing Mineral and Synthetic oils - the old and busted concepts
For the longest time, I had this to say about mixing mineral and synthetic oils:
- If you've been driving around with mineral oil in your engine for years, don't switch to synthetic oil without preparation. Synthetic oils have been known to dislodge the baked-on deposits from mineral oils and leave them floating around your engine - not good. I learned this lesson the hard way! It's wise to use a flushing oil first.
- If you do decide to change, only go up the scale. If you've been running around on synthetic, don't change down to a mineral-based oil - your engine might not be able to cope with the degradation in lubrication. Consequently, if you've been using mineral oil, try a semi or a full synthetic oil. By degradation, I'm speaking of the wear tolerances that an engine develops based on the oil that it's using. Thicker mineral oils mean thicker layers of oil coating the moving parts (by microns though). Switching to a thinner synthetic oil can cause piston rings to leak and in some very rare cases, piston slap or crank vibration.
- Gaskets and seals! With the makeup of synthetic oils being different from mineral oils, mineral-oil-soaked gaskets and seals have been known to leak when exposed to synthetic oils. Perhaps not that common an occurrence, but worth bearing in mind nevertheless.
That's the thing with progress - stuff becomes out-of-date. Fortunately for you, dear reader, the web is a great place to keep things up-to-date, so here's the current thinking on the subject of mixing mineral and synthetic oils. This information is based on the answer to a technical question posed on the Shell Oil website.
There is no scientific data to support the idea that mixing mineral and synthetic oils will damage your engine. When switching from a mineral oil to a synthetic, or vice versa, you will potentially leave a small amount of residual oil in the engine. That's perfectly okay because synthetic oil and mineral-based motor oil are, for the most part, compatible with each other. (The exception is pure synthetics. Polyglycols don't mix with normal mineral oils.)
There is also no problem with switching back and forth between synthetic and mineral based oils. In fact, people who are "in the know" and who operate engines in areas where temperature fluctuations can be especially extreme, switch from mineral oil to synthetic oil for the colder months. They then switch back to mineral oil during the warmer months.
There was a time, years ago, when switching between synthetic oils and mineral oils was not recommended if you had used one product or the other for a long period of time. People experienced problems with seals leaking and high oil consumption but changes in additive chemistry and seal material have taken care of those issues. And that's an important caveat. New seal technology is great, but if you're still driving around in a car from the 80's with its original seals, then this argument becomes a bit of a moot point - your seals are still going to be subject to the old leakage problems no matter what newfangled additives the oil companies are putting in their products.
A quick guide to the different grades of oil.
Fully Synthetic
Grades
0W-30
0W-40
5W-40
Characteristics
Fuel economy savings
Enhances engine performance and power
Ensures engine is protected from wear and deposit build-up
Ensures good cold starting and quick circulation in freezing temperatures
Gets to moving parts of the engine quickly
Semi-synthetic
Grades
5W-30
10W-40
15W-40
Characteristics
Better protection
Good protection within the first 10 minutes after starting out
Roughly three times better at reducing engine wear
Increased oil change intervals - don't need to change it quite so often
Mineral
Grades
10W-40
15W-40
Characteristics
Basic protection for a variety of engines
Oil needs to be changed more often
"High mileage" oils.
More and more oil companies are coming out with "high mileage" oils now, some recommended for engines with as few as 75,000 miles on them. So what is a "high mileage" oil you ask? Well very generally speaking, these oils have two additives in them which are more suited to older engines. The first is normally a burnoff-inhibitor which helps prevent the oil from burning off if it gets past an engine seal into the combustion chamber. The second is a "seal conditioner", the exact makeup of which I'm not sure of, but it's designed to soak into seals such as head- and rocker-cover gaskets and force them to expand. Thus if one of the seals is a bit leaky, the seal conditioner will attempt to minimise the leak.
I've not had experience of high mileage oils myself, but a few people who've e-mailed me have passed on various tales from it being the miracle cure to it making no difference at all. I think the general rule-of-thumb though should be "if it 'aint broke, don't fix it." Just because your engine has over 75,000 miles on it, doesn't automatically mean you need high mileage oil. Is the exhaust sooty or smokey? Are you noticing oil leaks? Is the engine consuming oil? If your engine is working fine, the exhaust is clean and you're not noticing any problems, my guess is that it doesn't need high-mileage oil.
Viscosity and Viscosity Index (VI).
The proper viscosity is the single most important criteria of a lubricating oil. The basic performance of machinery is based on the viscosity of the lubricant. Viscosity is, if you like, the resistance to the flowability of the oil. The thicker an oil, the higher its viscosity. The chart below shows a rough guide to ambient temperatures vs oil viscosity performance in both multigrade (top half) and single grade (lower half) oils.
Multigrade oils work by having a polymer added to a light base oil which prevents the oil from thinning too much as it warms up. At low temperatures, the polymers are coiled up and allow the oil to flow as it's low number (W number) indicates. As the oil heats up, the polymers unwind into long chains which prevent the oil from thinning as much as it normally would. The result is that at 100°C, the oil has thinned only as much as it's higher rating. Think of it like this: a 10W30 oil is a 10-weight oil that will not thin more than a 30-weight oil when it gets hot.
The viscosity index of a lubricant is an empirical formula that allows the change in viscosity in the presence of heat to be calculated. This tells the user how much the oil will thin when it is subjected to heat. The higher the viscosity index, the less an oil will thin at a specified temperature. Multi-viscosity motor oils will have a viscosity index well over 100, while single viscosity motor oils and most industrial oils will have a VI of about 100 or less.
Viscosity and oil weight numbers is quite a nauseatingly detailed topic. So if you're curious about why a 15W50 oil is so-called, then put on the geek shield and pop over to the Viscosity Page.....
