Oil changes... automobile

Ken Ibold said:
My 2004 Honda Pilot is at 234,000 miles. Synthetic since new, changed at about 7,500 miles. Sometimes as much as 9,000, seldom less than 7,300. Engine runs like new. Does not lose a drop of oil between changes.
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I seem to recall that 7500 is the Honda factory design recommendation. Of course the service department says every 3000, just to be safe. I figure that 7500 must already include an engineer's padding, so the real number is probably somewhere between 15 and 20k miles as engineered.

I've changed oil in the '03 Civic between 5k and 10k miles, depending on timing....for a while I only drove it to the airport once a week, so I changed after 6 months. It's made it to 220,000 miles and still going strong. I doubt it will make 300,000 miles, but I'm not overly worried about 230,000. Only recently replaced a power steering hose that had a small crack and I suspect the other rubber power steering hose needs it too. I hate the car, but it's been a workhorse.

Comma before an AND in a list is called an oxford comma. It differentiates between whether or not the last item in a list is a compound single item or two separate items. Describing logically, it is the difference between (apples) and (oranges) and (bananas) vs (apples) and (oranges and bananas). If you never use an oxford comma, then you have no way to denote the second instead of the first.
 
Sac Arrow said:
There is nothing wrong with putting a comma before an 'and.'
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The Oxford comma is an anachronism from the last century. It is time to throw off the yoke of OCD editors and grammarians who are living in the past!
 
Sac Arrow said:
When I'm in a really foul mood, I'll punch an old lady, kick a small puppy dog, and start an oil thread on the Internet.
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Clark1961 said:
May as well turn it into a nitpicking grammar thread. You used an extra comma in that post.
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That's the new Yale/Oxford comma format, that gets used too often, too many places, and too often incorrectly.
 
Finally, some post showin off educashion!
 
My experience with my 1999 S-10:

Bought new, and changed oil every five thousand miles.231,000 miles later the engine had never had any work done except a water pump replacement. Can't blame that on oil. It was still running fine and using no oil when I sold it.

I made it easy on myself and changed oil on the fives, tens, etc.
 
steingar said:
Oil threads are fun. Ask 5 different mechanics about oil, you'll get 5 different answers. Ask 5 different drivers and you'll get 10.
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I've known gearheads who got into fistfights over which was the best oil.

I never went that far, but I do find it interesting. There's a lot of science that goes into designing an oil. They're different enough that there really are some oils that are better for some engines under some defined set of environmental and use conditions, at least in theory. In practice, maybe not so much. But I still think it's interesting.

Rich
 
cowman said:
3-4k conventional on older or well worn engines.

Newer/low mileage/still nice and tight engines 5-10k synthetic.

My experience has been once an engine gets older/higher mileage it will start using synthetic oil at a high rate past 4k or so. At that point, to me, there's no point in using expensive synthetic anymore. I just go to conventional and change at 3-4k at that point.
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On an old car with a questionable maintenance history, I sometimes do a couple of very-short OCI oil changes with a diesel-rated oil like Rotella, Delvac, etc. to douche them out. I keep the intervals to 750 - 1000 miles. Much more than that and I start worrying about the filters getting clogged up. Sometimes the high-detergency oil cleans up enough of the crud to solve the oil-burning problems.

The most consistent oil burners I know of were the Saturn S-Series engines because of the less-than-wonderful oil control ring design. They didn't burn a lot of oil so much as they all burned at least some oil, especially after ~75K miles. Saturn sold a piston-soak to clean them up, but I found that using Seafoam or MMO as a soak worked just as well if a course or two of Rotella or Delvac didn't do the trick.

Rich
 
Ted DuPuis said:
On any new vehicle, I'd tend to agree. However with older vehicles that didn't have as tight of engines, I disagree. On my 3000GT VR-4 I changed the oil every 3,000 miles, and you could start to tell at 2,500 miles that the oil was getting old.

To the original question, do what the manual recommends. The engineers put a whole lot of effort into figuring out what the appropriate times were for this. Personally I've never paid much attention to calendar time (unless that was just a convenient time to change for other reasons, like my tractors). Reality is in my experience the calendar times don't matter a whole lot on oil in the automotive world because modern engines are very tight and fuel injection helps keep the oil clean. This is also why oil change intervals have stretched out so much.

My cars now (two Mercedes and the Ram) all tell me when the oil needs changed, so I try to change a little ahead of schedule.
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I guess I should qualify that, it has been the case with any car I've owned. I started going 10,000 miles on the Concours and the Explorer, using synthetic oil. Both were perfectly happy with that arrangement and the Explorer went over 200K without using oil or blowing smoke. I would not, however, go more than 5,000 miles on conventional oil. Many older vehicles specified ranges from 3,000 miles to 7,500 miles depending on operating conditions. My dad used to use 7,500 mile intervals using crappy oil. His engines seldom went beyond 60K before blowing smoke.

My new Sentra specifies 5,000 mile intervals, and SN grade 0W-20, which by the way generally can't be found as a conventional oil, if that even exists. As it's my car, but I get to expense the maintenance, it's getting changed every 5,000 miles.
 
Every 3,000 in my McLaren.
 
Sac Arrow said:
I guess I should qualify that, it has been the case with any car I've owned. I started going 10,000 miles on the Concours and the Explorer, using synthetic oil. Both were perfectly happy with that arrangement and the Explorer went over 200K without using oil or blowing smoke. I would not, however, go more than 5,000 miles on conventional oil. Many older vehicles specified ranges from 3,000 miles to 7,500 miles depending on operating conditions. My dad used to use 7,500 mile intervals using crappy oil. His engines seldom went beyond 60K before blowing smoke.

My new Sentra specifies 5,000 mile intervals, and SN grade 0W-20, which by the way generally can't be found as a conventional oil, if that even exists. As it's my car, but I get to expense the maintenance, it's getting changed every 5,000 miles.
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I figured as much, just wanted to clarify that for old cars, it still matters.

I went a long time using only conventional oil, but nowadays it's full synthetic only for my cars. Of course, I also have 3 vehicles that have pretty high demands on the oil between two modern Mercedes and the Cummins.

Conventional goes in the tractors. And of course the 414 gets aviation oil.
 
Wow!!! A lot of good opinions here (concerning both oil and commas).

Thanks to everyone for the information. I really was not aware there was so many different opinions.

I think I would rather change it too often rather than not often enough.
 
Kritchlow said:
Wow!!! A lot of good opinions here (concerning both oil and commas).

Thanks to everyone for the information. I really was not aware there was so many different opinions.

I think I would rather change it too often rather than not often enough.
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Who is using kritch’s account?
 
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