ALL Your Oil Questions Answered!

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Wholly Geezus, I have NEVER in my whole life seen anything SO informational and complete about oil. If you can read ALL 60 pages of EXPLANATION about oil pressures, oil weight, oil quality, correct weights, etc etc... You will be pretty much an expert. This will include weight of oil explanation for conditions of driving. There is even a self test about it and information is current!

For most of you there is about 10 chapters to this article, if you wanna skim and don't care to understand, read the last 2 paragraphs from each chapter. There is also 2 self tests for comprehension! Happy reading!

Excerpt from Motor Oil - All Chapters, Inclusive -Copy and Save This - FerrariChat.com

About the author:
Dr. Haas is a physician and surgeon. He graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in biochemistry with honors. He studied motor oils since high school where he did independent studies on this topic. He studied the properties of viscosity.

When he was a general surgery resident in Chapel Hill he studied the flow mechanics of human blood. Today he continues his research by discussion of oil products with chemists in the field and chemists from the oil manufacturers.

He has personal racing experience in Formula Super Vee. He is his own Lamborghini and Ferrari as well as Mercedes mechanic.



Chapter One - Motor Oil 101

I think it is time to go over passenger car automotive engine oils in detail. I will be writing several articles to be published soon so I will try to get some of it out here. I feel this is a very general topic for all car owners on this board.

This is a very difficult topic to comprehend. Everybody including good mechanics think they are experts in this field but few understand engine oils. Most of what I hear is the opposite of the truth. It is however easy to see how people get mixed up as there is always some truth to the misconception.

Please forgive me if I am too wordy or even verbose at times. I will be redundant for certain. This will be in areas that people have to hear things over and over again to get it right. Some will never be able to understand these concepts unfortunately. I base my thoughts on those whom I have been listening to in various automotive chat rooms and discussion with mechanics. I will try to minimize technical terms and be somewhat vague rather than exact. I will round and average numbers to make the point simple rather than mathematically exact. Thickness has the same meaning as viscosity. Viscosity is a measure of the resistance of a fluid (liquid or gas) to flow. Fluids with high viscosity, such as molasses, flow more slowly than those with low viscosity, such as water. Again, I am trying to explain general principals as I know them.

The greatest confusion is because of the way motor oils are labeled. It is an old system and is confusing to many people. I know the person is confused when they say that a 0W-30 oil is too thin for their engine because the old manual says to use 10W-30. This is wrong.

More confusion occurs because people think in terms of the oil thinning when it gets hot. They think this thinning with heat is the problem with motor oil. It would be more correct to think that oil thickens when it cools to room temperature and THIS is the problem. In fact this is the problem. It is said that 90 percent of engine wear occurs at startup. If we are interested in engine longevity then we should concentrate our attention at reducing engine wear at startup.

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