One of my P-car buddy's sent this to me. If you can stay awake and read through it...there is some interesting findings by this company/person. Info initially specifies air cooled P-cars and motorcycles. The application does cover water cooled so there is some relevant info. Even so, some interesting points applicable to all auto's.

http://www.lnengineering.com/oil.html

 

Good article. Couple of great points brought up to the front by the author:

1) Engine wear decreases as oil ages to a certain extent, which means that changing your oil more frequently actually causes more engine wear. This is supported by various SAE studies.
2) Not all motor oils are created equally when it comes to the levels of additives and detergents used. For example, some SM, CJ-4 oils are inferior in wear protection than earlier SL/SH/SJ rated formulations.

I wish the author could discuss more about 1) base oil 2) additives other than Zn, P, B, because the final PCMO product is what we use, not individual components.

Only disappointment is the lack of definition of a true synthetic oil, under "type" of that long table, information such as M1 15w50 as synthetic oil could be wrong. According to Mobil Japan web site M1 15w50 should be a "SEMI".

 

Yep proven again. Another independent site did oil tests and found the same thing. I tell people they are wasting their money and actually causing more wear in their engines by doing oil changes every 2000 miles etc. They look at me like I am from Mars. Just follow the manufacturers recommendations.

 

Exactly. I treated my RX with Auto-RX recently. Because the treatment requires me to change dino oil @ 1.5K interval, I ended up using 5 gallons of dino oil in two months. I was happy to get rid of some of the old oil laying around in the garage. But 20 quarts in 2 months for one car is a waste of natural resource. For a normal (non oil chewing) engine, 3K OCI is not environmental friendly either.