Which oil do you use?
Discussion
I used to use some pretty expensive synthetics from the US which made for costly oil changes as I had a Gp A big wing sump. After a while I went back to ordinary 20/50 mineral oils and back then I had turbo's. When I did eventually dismantle the engine it was in really good nick. I was pleasantly surprised.
Penrite HPR15 for me, its a fully-synthetic 15W60 "full zinc" (1050 ppm) oil available from Classic Oils at £33.00 for 5 litres.
If you're looking for a mineral 20w50 oil that's better value than Valvoline VR1 but performs exactly the same then Classic Oils offer their own 'Heritage' brand product, this mineral oil has the same zinc content as VR1 of 1300 parts per million but is only £17.00 for 5 litres.
The Heritage 20w50 was specifically blended to exactly match Valvoline VR1 viscosity, additive package and quality. Basically Classic Oils looked at the make-up of the excellent and well respected VR1 and copied it exactly offering it at a price point that saves you around £13.00 per 5 litres over the VR1 which recently seems to have increased in price to £30 per 5 litres.
If you switch from VR1 to Heritage 20w50 you'll enjoy a useful £18.00 saving over VR1 on every Chimaera (7 litre) oil change, and with no loss in quality.
Whatever oil you choose, the target zinc content (ZDDP) range you should be looking for is 1000-1300ppm, no less than 1000 & no more than 1300 parts per million (ppm). Anything within this bracket is perfect, after tat you need to decide if you want to pay the premium for a synthetic (semi or full) over a good old mineral oil. If you follow my choice of Penrite HPR15 15W60 it's only going to cost you £3.00 more to go fully synthetic per 5 litres over the mineral Valvoline VR1, which has to be the best value oil upgrade going.
My chimaera takes close to 7 litres including filling the filter, to manage the cost of each change and give my car the best quality lubrication maintenance package I've taken to using 5 litres of Penrite HR15 fully-synthetic 15W60 and topping off it off with 2 litres of very cost effective Heritage 20w50. Over the 4,000 miles between changes my engine consumes the remaining 3 litres of Heritage 20w50, when I come to the end of the the Heritage 20w50 it's time for the next oil change.
I use the 12,000 mile rated synthetic media Royal Purple 20-253 oil filter which is expensive at £18.49 but its superior quality and performance allows me change it every second oil change, ie every 8,000 miles so well under Royal Purple's 12,000 mile recommendation.
Each 4,000 mile oil change therefore costs me £39.80 for the oil + £9.25 for the filter element giving a total of £49.05, with an additional £10.20 of Heritage 20w50 consumed between each change. So basically I'm spending £60 on oil & filtration every 4,000 miles which works out at £0.015p per mile, (one and a half pence per mile).
My TVR is not a garage queen, it gets used a lot so buying oils that cost as much as £60 for 5 litres is both impractical and largely pointless given the car never sees the track. I designed my above oil & filter package to deliver the best quality vs price (best value) lubrication maintenance schedule for my Chimaera which typically covers 8,000 per year.
If you're looking for a mineral 20w50 oil that's better value than Valvoline VR1 but performs exactly the same then Classic Oils offer their own 'Heritage' brand product, this mineral oil has the same zinc content as VR1 of 1300 parts per million but is only £17.00 for 5 litres.
The Heritage 20w50 was specifically blended to exactly match Valvoline VR1 viscosity, additive package and quality. Basically Classic Oils looked at the make-up of the excellent and well respected VR1 and copied it exactly offering it at a price point that saves you around £13.00 per 5 litres over the VR1 which recently seems to have increased in price to £30 per 5 litres.
If you switch from VR1 to Heritage 20w50 you'll enjoy a useful £18.00 saving over VR1 on every Chimaera (7 litre) oil change, and with no loss in quality.
Whatever oil you choose, the target zinc content (ZDDP) range you should be looking for is 1000-1300ppm, no less than 1000 & no more than 1300 parts per million (ppm). Anything within this bracket is perfect, after tat you need to decide if you want to pay the premium for a synthetic (semi or full) over a good old mineral oil. If you follow my choice of Penrite HPR15 15W60 it's only going to cost you £3.00 more to go fully synthetic per 5 litres over the mineral Valvoline VR1, which has to be the best value oil upgrade going.
My chimaera takes close to 7 litres including filling the filter, to manage the cost of each change and give my car the best quality lubrication maintenance package I've taken to using 5 litres of Penrite HR15 fully-synthetic 15W60 and topping off it off with 2 litres of very cost effective Heritage 20w50. Over the 4,000 miles between changes my engine consumes the remaining 3 litres of Heritage 20w50, when I come to the end of the the Heritage 20w50 it's time for the next oil change.
I use the 12,000 mile rated synthetic media Royal Purple 20-253 oil filter which is expensive at £18.49 but its superior quality and performance allows me change it every second oil change, ie every 8,000 miles so well under Royal Purple's 12,000 mile recommendation.
Each 4,000 mile oil change therefore costs me £39.80 for the oil + £9.25 for the filter element giving a total of £49.05, with an additional £10.20 of Heritage 20w50 consumed between each change. So basically I'm spending £60 on oil & filtration every 4,000 miles which works out at £0.015p per mile, (one and a half pence per mile).
My TVR is not a garage queen, it gets used a lot so buying oils that cost as much as £60 for 5 litres is both impractical and largely pointless given the car never sees the track. I designed my above oil & filter package to deliver the best quality vs price (best value) lubrication maintenance schedule for my Chimaera which typically covers 8,000 per year.
Boosted LS1 said:
^ Do you find that the oil stays cleaner for longer because you use lpg?
Oh boy yes!..... Here's my oil colour at the 4,000 miles change point.
Basically it looks exactly the same as it did the day I filed the engine with roughly 7 litres of new oil 4,000 miles previously. However, I continue to change my oil at 4,000 miles because oil coulour is really only part of the picture, while it's nice to see how clean the oil remains it actually tells you little or nothing about the molecular breakdown of the oil. The oil in my LPG powered TVR still gets chopped up, the oil is still subject to the same shear and heat punishment as a petrol powered car so I continue to run a 4,000 mile oil change schedule.
The reason my engine oil stays so clean is all down to the super clean burning nature of LPG, petrol & LPG are both hydrocarbons and as we know a hydrocarbon is any fuel that is made up of hydrogen and carbon. What makes LPG different is it has one less carbon molecule (3 vs 4) than petrol... which is significant! The only cleaner fuel is pure hydrogen, being pure hydrogen there are no carbon molecules at all so the only element to come out the tail pipe of a car burning pure hydrogen is H2O, H20 is water and in this case 100% pure water you could put straight into a glass & drink.
Back to LPG, further proof of my clean burning combustion process can be observed when my iridium plugs are removed & inspected, running super low carbon LPG controlled by my carefully mapped Canems dual fuel engine management system delivers an exceptionally clean burn.
Compare this with one of my plugs when I was running the old Lucas 14CUX and distributor on petrol, & what I consider to be the very inappropriate (for NA RV8s) NGK B7ECS.
It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to visualise the difference in internal engine cleanlinesses (piston crowns, back of the valve heads stems) between where I'm at now and when I first bought my petrol only 14CUX Chimaera over 7 years ago. Further benefits of LPG are that idle quality and idle to 2,000rpm drivaility are greatly improved on LPG, this is because LPG burns slower and way more completely at lower engine/air speeds that petrol.
This is down to LPG being a gaseous fuel, as a gas it mixes much more readily with air which is obviously a gas too, two gasses will always mix better than a gas (air) and a liquid (petrol) will. At low engine/air speeds the relatively heavy droplets of liquid fuel tend to fall out of separation with the air due to gravity, on cold start things are even worse as a liquid fuel will also readily condense on the cold internal walls of the inlet inlet manifold, there is none of this with a gaseous fuel like LPG.
LPG is also 110Ron allowing for (and demanding due to the slower burn) greater levels of ignition advance, get this element right and you can deliver a suer smooth RV8 especially from idle to 2,000rpm when compared with one burning petrol. After much experimentation I now run a surprising 27/28 degrees of advance on LPG at idle, the engine then gets a further 2 degrees over the whole ignition map at air temperatures of 10-20 degrees C (warm up & winter) so it's quite common for me to see 30 degrees of advance at idle on my Canems software screen. At 2,500-3,000rpm at 25-40kpa of engine load which equates to 75-80mph motorway cruise conditions I run whopping 49 degrees of advance on gas.
In summary there's lot more advantages to LPG that the fact it's roughly half the price of petrol, not bad for a readily available fuel the old RV8 clearly loves to consume
Edited by ChimpOnGas on Saturday 11th February 10:48
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