Archive for the 'Engine oil' Category
We put motor oil in our engines to serve several purposes. First, obviously, oil acts as a lubricant. If your engine is operating correctly, there is almost no metal to metal contact – everything is riding on a thin film of oil. However, oil has several other important jobs to do. Oil circulates throughout your engine, and cools parts that cannot get near a water jacket. For example, it’s becoming common in sport bikes to spray oil on the underside of the piston to cool it. There are no water jackets at all in your transmission. Motorcycle transmissions are oil cooled.
Your piston rings do not do a perfect job of sealing. Some combustion by products will slip past the rings into the engine. This can be little particles of carbon. Remember, diamond is carbon that was combined under heat and pressure. These little carbon particles can be quite damaging to your engine. Another job of your oil is to hold these particles in suspension until the oil filter can grab them. Also, if your gasoline has sulphur in it (it does), this sulphur can react with water and oxygen to make sulphuric acid. This is some stuff that is seriously bad for your engine. Your oil has special ingredients in it called buffers to neutralize acids. Finally, your engine can get internal build ups of tars, waxes, and other gunk. Your oil has solvents to try to dissolve this stuff and get and keep your engine clean.
How much do you value the engine in your car? Think about it, because the life of your engine depends in no small part on the quality of the oil you put in it – oil is the lifeblood of your car’s engine. From the mid 80′s for 8 or 9 years there was a veritable revolution in car engine oil. All oils were no longer the same thanks to the popularity of hot hatches, 16-valve engines and turbos as the tuner scene started to rise. Combined with the devastating problems of black death, the days of one oil catering for everyone were over.
Take Castrol for example. They led the field for years with GTX. This was surpassed a few years back by semi-synthetic and fully synthetic oils, including GTX2 and GTX3 Lightec. Now, that’s been surpassed by Formula SLX which can cost upwards of $75 for 5 litres. And most recently, Castrol GTX Magnatec which is muscling in on the hitherto separate world of friction reducers.