On a similar note, when I bought a new Hyundai decided to use the dealer for the oil change just because of the warranty. They put a dent on the door but also the receipt stated 5W-20 oil but the sticker on the window was saying 5W-30. So I asked the service writer which one they used. He asked “which one do you want?” He was going to fix one or the other; so I asked which oil was actually used. He said we only have one barrel of oil and we use it for all the cars…
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As long as you’re using an oil consistent with the required spec, using dino oil and changing more frequently is the better oil & filter change-out strategy imo. I don’t see you going too far wrong with that approach.
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So which one was it? 
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It would be helpful to know in reagards to not being able to read the stick. Fresh Valveleen is very clear and sometime hard to read on the stick. the good news is if it’s that clear it didn’t pick up more dirt after being circulated as fresh oil which can happen if it had gone too far between changes or is inherently dirty or sludgy. When I buy a used car I change the oil, drive it for about a week and change it again. The cost of doing that is far less than not having all the grit out of the oil.
In broad daylight you should be able to see it on the stick no matter what it is. I know Pennsoil is dark to start with and and that is why I don’t use it. But it does show up easy on the stick after a fresh change. Castro oil I’m not sure about.
Try to raise the stick without hitting the sides of the tube. Oil deposited on the sides of the tube will end up back on the stick after you wipe it off when you put it back, and try to put the stick down the center of the tube when you put it back in. Make certain you have shoved it in all the way because they have a rubber piece at the top that you have to shove in to get it all the way down. Carefully lift the stick trying not to glance the sides, hold it out level to to read it because it will run down if you hold it downward. Then wipe it off and do it all again. Make sure you have the same reading twice in a row.
If you don’t find oil on the stick be alarmed. Actually if it is down so far as to not read, the engines should sound like it’s rattling. Of course start adding oil until it show up on the stick then a little at a time to top it off. It takes some time for oil added to overhead cam engines to reach the pan so let it stand for a few minutes or start it for a few seconds and then wait before you check it again.
Mr. McCormick, it sounds like you have a great head on your shoulders. Keep up the good work.
Re: the shop that tried to con you into using something different, be sure you let all your friends, family members, coworkers and acquaintances of this experience to steer them away from that shop and reduce the probability of that shop using the wrong oil in their vehicles.
There ARE differences in oils, and using the incorrect oil in an engine can cause damage. Modern engines with turbochargers have specific requirements (synthetics to withstand the heat of the turbocharger bearings), and even in naturally aspirated engines the wrong weight can cause problems AND oil too rich in viscosity modifiers are not as well lubricated. An oil should never have greater than a 30 difference between its base weight and its hot weight equivalent. Viscosity modifiers are microscopic coiled polymers that expand when heated, modifying its viscosity at higher temperatures, but the modifiers are not as good at lubricating as the oil itself.
In short, you’re absolutely correct in demanding that the correct oil be used and I tip my hat to your sticking to your guns.
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@Carboncrank [quote=“Carboncrank, post:24, topic:116535”]
Actually if it is down so far as to not read, the engines should sound like it’s rattling.
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You know interesting you bring that point up. . Probably best for another thread but…
We bought this car used when it had 63,000 miles on it. From what information I got, two owner car history. First owner was an elderly lady whose husband had past away and so she didn’t drive it too much hence such the low mileage. The car is, from all I can tell still running on mostly original parts. Things I have were the coolant which wasn’t in great condition, and all other fluids along with rad hoses.
Now since we’ve had it it’s always had this rattling sound that sounds as if it’s coming from the drivers pedal and it will only happen sometimes if I’m driving 40mph through 50 and then it’ll go away or if I’m going up a grade and have to give it gas it’ll start giving me this rattling like noise… I haven’t given it much thought because I haven’t gotten lights and I haven’t noticed any significant engine performance issues… but I need to get it in a shop to have cchecked throughly.
Certainly will do a write up and let other potential customers know about my experience! It certainly is amazing some shops can stay in business by operating how some do. How one “professional” mechanic can assure his customers that it’s safe to use different oil grades that aren’t recommended for their cars is very concerning indeed.
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I don’t see where you said what kind of car it is but. I’m going to assume it’s a 4-cylinder with a 4-speed automatic transmission with a locking torque converter. Let’s say you accelerate easy up to 45 miles an hour. By the time you reach 38 to 40 miles an hour it will have shifted into 4th gear. As it gives above 40-42 the the torque converter will go into lock mode so that you have direct drive into the transmission from the engine. At 45 miles an hour in lock up the engine will be lumbering along slowly. When engine RPMs are low and the torque converter is locked up every little acceleration or increase in grade applies a high load to the engine. Low RPM and high load is what’s called lugging the engine. That’s the point where an engine is most likely to spark knock. A good check on this wood be to put it in a state where it’s knocking and steadily increase the throttle until the torque converter kicks out of lockup. As soon as that happens engine RPMs go up a little as now you’re in torque converter stall instead of lockup and you’ve created a cushion between the engine and transmission. If I’m right, when this happens the knocking stops. And it doesn’t happen cruising above 50 because the RPMs are high enough for your not to be lugging the engine. I have a good feeling about being right about this because if I’m right it should be easily fixable although if I’m right you also can damage the engine By ignoring it.
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Engine knock is pre detonation in the cylinder. Piston is supposed to come up And compress the fuel-air mixture then the spark plug is supposed to ignite the mixture When the piston just passed as top dead center. If ignition happens before the Piston gets to top dead center the detonation tries to drive the Piston back the other direction and makes the whole assembly rattle oh, as you can imagine. There are various things that can make it pre detonate in an old engine. Carbon deposits and carbon fouled spark plugs are the culprit. Carbon deposits in the cylinder head Can get hot enough to glow red in the cylinder and ignite the mixture while the Piston is still on its way up. Same with the spark plug. Hot carbon deposits on the plug can set the mixture off before the spark plug ignites.
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Make sure you’re using the right octane fuel. But if what I’m saying checks out when you test drive it here’s the first thing you should do. If the fuel tank is low add at least 5 gallons of the next octane grade up. If you have say like 5 or 6 gallons already in the tank, top it off with the highest octane you can get. You have to raise the octane level of what’s in the tank. But even if that stops the knocking if you haven’t found the real problem. Pull the spark plugs out and look at them. You can read the conditions inside the cylinder head by what you see on the spark plugs. I’m practically fanatical about reading spark plugs. Especially on my motorcycle. If you have a lot of black deposits or chunks of black or actually chunks of any kind any color on the plug then you can be sure that the rest of the cylinder head is full of deposits too. You can clean or replace the plugs to eliminate that as a source but then you have to deal with what’s in the cylinder head. I am old school. Drive on the freeway out of town and find a free way ring freeway ramp where you can roll on slow enough that when you plant your foot on the floor your drops back into first gear. Leave your foot on the floor and run the engine all the way to redline for it should shift let it run all the way to red line again and let it shift and run it as far up in 3rd gear as you can given the traffic conditions you find on the freeway and if part clear of traffic just leave your foot on the floor and run it up to about 90 miles an hour then quickly back down so you don’t get busted. No of course you want to be safe about this so pick a time when there’s not much traffic. It’s about 15 or 20 seconds flat out. Then you get off, turn around, and do the same thing coming back. You are a little actually trying to blow the crap out of the cylinder head and you are doing it by maximizing the volume you can get to go through it and create high temperature in the cylinder head so those hot carbon deposits will break off in the hot and turbulent conditions of being run at Full Throttle. I’ve done that with old engines that have seen too much Stop and go and slow driving and I’ve actually seen the black smoke come out of the tailpipe. There are fuel additives that can help with carbon deposits but I’m not a big fan of that. I fan of finding a safe situation to run Full Throttle to near Red Line every time I drive the car. Freeway on-ramps or ideal for that. Most economy cars are going to be about 10 or more seconds from 0 to 60 flat out so you can run flat out down and on ramp and just be arriving at merge speed. I also think it is safer to arrive at the end of an on-ramp a little faster than you need to go versus a little slower than you need to go. That’s my recipe for blowing carbon out of an engine and trust me, Carbon doesn’t stay around long in my car or my motorcycle. Don’t drive like an old lady. If you get it cleaned out and fresh plugs you can go back to the fuel grade you were using before. You could even check if it’s ready by looking at the spark plug again. I’m trying to drive home the point that the spark plug is part of the cylinder head but it’s a part of the cylinder head you can take out and look at. It’s your window into the spark plug. If spark plug is nice and clean with nothing more than a light brown color on the insulator and the electrodes are clean.
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But if raising the fuel grade and replacing or cleaning the spark plugs doesn’t fix the problem, again assuming you’ve tested my theory of it only happening when the engine is lugging, then you’ve got a timing issue which could be simple or not.
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A lot of people aren’t aware of torque converter lockup. To see distinctly what it is just accelerate about half throttle and listen to the shifting. You’ll hear it shift from 1st to 2nd, from 2nd to 3rd, from 3rd to 4th, then when it goes into torque converter lock-up it’ll just feel like it shifted into another gear. And in fact it did because that lock up changed the overall gear ratio.
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get back to me
Fluid checks by law? Really? Never heard of this but I guess that’s CA. for ya. How do you know he didn’t check? Because something wasn’t full? Does he have to fill all the fluids by law? And to be honest if just asking you a couple questions (even if they are questions you don’t like) get you irritated enough to post about it here, I don’t think I’d want you as a customer. When. I was in a shop I was asked annoying, irrelevant and yes even stupid questions all day. I think you should just move on and find a shop the better suits you.
@Carboncrank I very much appreciate you’re insights into what might be causing the problem. I’m no mechanic, but I like to learn something new whenever I can about cars. But really I’m not going to have much time in the next few weeks to be pulling spark plugs and checking on the car myself ( work sucks sometimes) but I’m just going to get her to my guy who I trust and whom I’ve been taking my car to for the past 10 years without problems when he’s back from vacation. In the meantime I will commute with my other car.
I’ll be sure to post back what he comes up with when I am able to.
When you get a 17 year old kid at the oil change place telling you what to do, just ask to see his engineering stamp so you can compare that with the folks that wrote the manual.
@PvtPublic yes, it is required by law to do here, how many shops get away with not checking and regular people know not knowing about it is another matter entirely.
Simple, he never gave me a write up that stated what work he did. Usually here in California you get a write up and on it the shop will check off list of fluid checks. Again, I regularly check mine so I didn’t demand he check them.
Hey, that’s fine. I didn’t get irritated with him by asking me if I wanted to go a full synthetic route, even though I told him politely enough that I didn’t want to go that route, it was the fact that he was trying to sell me on putting in a different grade of oil that isn’t what my manufacturer specifies to use on my car. If you’re a mechanic and you start trying to tell your customers that they should be using a different grade of oil than what their book calls for… then I wouldn’t want to be going to your shop.
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@bing we’ll see this guy from all I could tell was well into his 30’s… along with the 3 other guys he had working for him. Kinda bizzare really.
all i was suggesting you do was test drive it as I described. You don’t need to pull spark plugs you are self unless you confirm what I said. Why would you stop driving it if you didn’t confirm what I said? It would be like normal driving just being aware of what I said.
If that’s a spark knock and you continue to drive it that way you’re going to seriously cut into the life of that engine.
Viscosity modifiers are in all multi weight oils. Viscosity modifiers are what makes multi grades multi grades. They are used in gear oils, automatic transmission fluids, power steering fluids, greases and various hydraulic fluids
There is more viscosity and less viscosity, what do you mean by oil too Rich In modifiers? Yes it’s the oil not the modifier that does the lubricating.
“oil that is not as well lubricated”… .? Parts get lubricated. Oil is the lubricator. Since the modifiers don’t do the lubricating how does it make oil that is less well lubricated (sic)?
10W30 motor-oil starts with a 10 weight oil and polymer modifiers are used so that it has the viscosity of a 30 weight oil at higher temperatures.
As for conventional oil vs. synthetic? If the factory recommends a synthetic use it. If it does not recommend it it’s up to you to perform the cost-benefit analysis.
Keep in mind “Full synthetic” is a marketing term and is not a measurable quality.
The term synthetic is extremely misleading. No Automotive synthetic oil I know of is actually synthetic in any way a normal person would use the word. They are made with hydrocarbon-based oil. They simply start with a more highly refined and pure version of oil that came out of the ground. Oils that previously were NOT considered as “synthetic” such as those that are produced by “severe refining”, “hydrogenation” or other complex chemical processes that yield a more stable molecular uniformity and higher degree of purity that is not achievable through normal “conventional” refining process are NOW also labeled as “synthetic” by their respective producers (SHELL, ExxonMobil, BP, SUNOCO) - they however still are made from Petroleum Crude.
Impurities ,sulfur and aromatics, found in regular petroleum motor oil are mostly gone. It is a more pure oil. But from base stock of oil out of the ground the process of making the final product is the same. Viscosity modifiers. There is no science that they can handle higher temperatures or handle shear better than petroleum-based oils.
Intuitively you could think that starting with a more pure oil is an advantage because leftover sledge’s are made of the impurities that aren’t in what are called synthetic oils. That may be true anecdotally. But there is no science that I can find. No data that doesn’t come from an oil company itself any benefit to synthetic oil whatsoever. No data on synthetic use in automotive vehicles at all that comes from an objective source.
They be better because they are more pure but Purity isn’t the problem with automotive oil. The main problem with oil is not high temperatures cold temperatures for shear, or at least there is no objective proof. The main problem is dirt. Dirt from outside the engine that ends up inside the engine. Dirt is grit this abrasive and your filter doesn’t get it all. If you are filter got it all you wouldn’t see it get dirty on the stick.
Synthetics are two to four times as expensive normal motor oil. Like I’ve said several times, motor oil is not a product it’s a marketing device. If you want to avoid getting hustled by this stuff just keep clean oil in your engine. Of course of the type that is Factory recommended for your car. Just change your oil and filter a couple of thousand miles sooner than Factory recommended and you can avoid all this nonsense.
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@Carboncrank I’m fortunate enough to have another car that I can drive, In the meantime I am going to try to give it premium gasoline to see if that makes the pinging go away. And I’m not going to continue to drive it this way which is why I have another car. I will take it to my mechanic if the premium gas doesn’t seem to fix the issue
Was also thinking maybe giving it some seafoam wouldn’t be such a terrible idea.
You don’t need full synthetic or a synthetic blend for your Vickie. You can likely go at least double the mileage between oil changes unless you do mostly stop and go driving in a very dusty area (severe service). If you want to continue your 3000 mile regimen, mineral oil is just fine.
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What we have here is most probably a red hot deal this station got on 10-40 synth and now overload with the stuff, pushing it HARD. Older cars + Owners manuals that use 10-?? + hot summer months + long vacations driving = making that large purchase should pay off in short time.
That said, such a smart businessman would also appreciate just as well the loyal customer coming back twice as often for your type of oil! Maybe he’s holding it for lack of space due to the 10-40syn elephant in his store room!
Nothing wrong with what you’re doing … except for listening to Car Talk preaching on this subject … only a bit difference from your practice by the book.
That is a real possibility.
One of my friends still talks about when his father–who owned a lower-class gin mill–bought a HUGE quantity of rot-gut Green River whiskey at a bargain price. He bought so many cases that the floor of the tavern started to sag, and he had to place jack-screws in the basement in order to keep the floor from collapsing. After a couple of years, he was selling shots of that awful stuff for 15 cents, just so that he could get rid of it. When he died, there were still a couple of cases left, and his family just poured that junk down the drain.
One way or another, you have to get rid of the stuff!
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