A friend sent me this. I have not read the methodology in great detail, but I think the results speak for themselves. Makes me sooooooooo glad I have Royal Purple in my car. Unfortunately they did not test Amsoil, which I also use and I know a few others here use as well.

Also, apparently Mobil 1 recently started blending in Dino oil. Maybe that's why they did so terribly here?

http://www.animegame.com/cars/Oil%20Tests.pdf

 

I had searched, unless it was buried deep in a thread I handn't seen it.
How is the test not valid? (Not arguing yet just curious)

 

It was from I think Fanman.

Serach for it

 

https://www.rx8club.com/showthread.p...ghlight=timken

 

The report was written by an oil distributor. Guess which oil they distribute?

 

It was not. It was written by streetcommodores.com magazine.

 

I never saw the original post. this was helpful. thanks and thank you for the repost.

Glad I just put royal purple in yesterday. Now I have to take the mobile 1 out of my wifes IS300 that we just put in yesterday also.
damn

 

how good are your reading comprehension skills?

 

I'm still tryig to figure out why 2 metal surfaces rubbing together with nothing more than a film of oil to protect them isn't a valid comparison? No one has ever answered that. We've seen people say they aren't valid results but that's it. I guarantee it's the companies that performed poorly that are crying foul.

 

would you put the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers in that category?

 

my sincere apologies to all. The other thread mentioned was posted 10 days ago. I had accumulated a body of knowledge of all synthetic oil info available on this site previous to that. Thus I assumed (wrongly) that nothing had changed (as it often does not), and that this test had not been posted.

I also read the responses and the redaction. I still think the test is valid, just not the end all be all of relevancy.

And I know I'm kind of self-thread merging here but Amsoil is sold at my local GI Joes, and is in a tranny of my family's due to it being supplied at a local shop. Amsoil creates microfranchises as a dealer network. The distributor is a usually a local guy who runs a small business. It can be mutually beneficial as it provides small business opportunities to locals and reduces overhead shipping costs for the company. But it can also come across as "Amway-ish" and reduce distribution.

 

Don't side step the issue. You haven't answered the question. How is a test that does nothing more than to measure wear between 2 surfaces with nothing more than oil between them not valid? That's about as simple and straight forward as you can get. True it's not about simulating true engine wear characteristics. It's about testing oil film strength. Tell me why it doesn't do this.

 

call up Timken and find out how repeatable the old test bearing ( ) their name is... its widely known not to give consistent results and is generally not used anymore

its even on wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timken_OK_Load

 

I think the test is valid but not up to industry standards. I'm guessing why Tinken discontinued the test is the precision is too low, while the science of tribology (of which I know nothing) became better at being very precise. This test, though, shows orders-of-magnitude difference in PSI and (qualitatively) results, which means a high order of precision is not necessary in determining which oils are SIGNIFICANTLY better than other oils (in the capacities of this test). In a close race (ala Mobile 1 vs. Mobile semi-synth) the precision matters and thus one cannot be said to be better than the other.

 

I don't see anything on Wikipedia that says it's bad other than to say that it's been pushed aside as the standard due to modern tribology studies. That was more of a history of it.

Keep in mind that as long as your oil does it's job, there is NEVER bearing contact anywhere. This is why bearings NEVER break in. However from time to time bearings do touch. If an engine has been sitting for a long time and the oil has drained out of it, there may be bearing contact at startup due to little or no oil present at the bearing surfaces at that time. This is where bearing wear occurs. They don't have break in wear. They have start up wear.

Now once the engine is spinning and oil is present, you should have no wear at all in your bearings. This is why I laugh at the UOA's that people get that seem to say things like "normal bearing wear" and so on. There is no normal bearing wear. There is startup wear. There's a difference. There are many things that can affect how well your oil protects and does it's job. I suspect that the people who are against this simple test are probably saying this because it doesn't show the effects of oil foaming in a closed pressurized oil system which can affect how well the oil keeps protecting. It's like adding Lucas oil treatment. You'll get heavy foaming and will hurt your oil's performance but it won't fall out of the engine so it should be there at startup. That's not a good tradeoff to me.

The timken test does show useful information. The key is to realize that it isn't the be all end all of tests as no one test tells you everything. I get the same arguments from people who say a flowbench is worthless on a rotary. I'll argue back that a dyno done only at full throttle doesn't tell you the whole story either. It doesn't. This is a test that has useful information but don't necessarily assume that it is all the oil info that you need. It isn't. Before you go spouting off that it isn't a valid test, quantify your statements with actually supporting evidence. Remember there is no reason to believe Mazda when they say not to use synthetics either but people quote their tsb's when it comes to this argument. Learn how to interpret data and then think out side the box for a while. You'll see how it is all relevant.

Keep in mind Royal Purple is still a far superior oil to the mainstream others out there though and this test didn't make it so.

 

Timken themselves canned the test in the early 70's because...

a) it turned out to be a test for Extreme Pressure protection additives rather then film strength.. ie the test then became useful for grease (and ball bearings) testing and not oil (and journal type bearings) testing. Testing engine oil with this test shows nothing. Gear oil would be slightly more useful but there are better tests for that.

b) repeated tests showed there is wild variations from test to test. You can take any grease and run the test 10 times and you'll get some that look good and some that look horrible. Test results are worthless if the test itself is not repeatable - which was ultimately why the test died 30 years ago.

Its a horribly old, out of date test that was dropped by the company that created it. That should be enough to tell you the validity of it.

 

How about a crankshaft with a bearing journal inside an engine? They are still 2 parts that move across each other with a film of oil between them that have a load on them. Is that a valid test? Should we be using grease instead? There is validity to the test. It's just not a test that tells you everything. I suspect the end of the test was really a result of oil companies getting pissed off that someone gave them a bloody nose. We still see crap like this today.

 

Your suspicion is dead wrong. The test was developed by Timken to assure customers using their bearings were using oils that wouldn't be detrimental to the lifespan of the bearing. Why would Timken throw their test out the window to approve inferior oils for their bearings? Inferior oils that would show their bearing would fail well before what their lifespan should be. That would cost them significant money and reputation.

A better question is if the magazine wanted a real test of oil, why did they use a test that has been known to be not supported for 30 years now? There are countless other currently approved tests they could have picked. Hell, they could have done something as easy as the test that rubs a piece of piston ring against a cylinder wall for a couple hundred hours or even something as full scale as the Volvo engine test where you run the crap out of an engine on an engine dyno for 20,000 simulated miles and then inspect for wear. The fact is the test was either motivated ignorance or accidental ignorance.

A loaded ball bearing gets at least 100x more point loading then a journal bearing. Load on a journal bearing is supported by the oil pressure accross the entire area of the bearing (well its not that cut and dry with how oil pools inside the bearing but close enough) where as a ball bearing has point to point contact over a very small area on a couple ball/roller/tapered bearings.

Pressure is force/area - a journal bearing will always have much greater area...

 

Yeah whatever. I'm done.

 

better to quit than make yourself appear to be a rotarymortal

 

thx to labdad, I didnt even know one of my post was deleted, and some of my important emails got deleted as well .......

lessons learned, never EVER leave your computer unlock with kids in your house.

Anyway, the author later said the test aint valid cuz its under diff condition or something isnt it ?

 

As the thread creator and thus supreme overlord of this argument (I thus declare it!) I'm going to have to go with Rotarygod on this one. As I said before, the test means something. I think we can assume initial conditions were controlled and the variance was just too high. However, unless you can give me solid numbers on that variance I will not buy the "random output" argument. I'm guessing that tribology/other tests just started getting better, or the variance did not meet the test creator's initial expectations. I would still argue several orders of magnitude difference means SOMETHING, even if it only applies to extreme pressure additives and is irrelevant to real world oil performance. But it still means something.

I doubt they did the Volvo test or the "hundreds of hours" tests because of time and money. These guys are out of Australia, where gas is more expensive. COuld you imagine running an engine for tens of thousands of hours for EACH OIL on $5/gal gas? I'm guessing they picked this one because it was quick and cheap, and because they didn't know it was not up to "spec". They apologized for not knowing later, and then followed it with "read our next article as we will do different, more appropriate tests."

Oh and I totally use Mobil 1 red synthetic grease on my journal bearings where my rotors connect to my crankshaft. Adds 5 horse!

 

Stepping even further outside the box, I ran Mobil1 in a Miata for 150,000 miles and the engine was quite happy. So, how do we correlate the fact that many cars are using to good effect an oil that appeared to fail miserably in this particular test? And how do we quantify the difference between the bearings with no appreciable wear with the ones like Mobil1 that have a huge ugly chunk gone? You'd think that Mobil1 engines would be failing left and right.

While the test is definitely measuring *something*, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is measuring anything useful in terms of suitability for use in lubricating automobile engines. Presence of huge amounts of EP additive don't necessarily equate to engine longevity, and in fact can poison your catalytic converter (ZDDP).

I would take the side that the relevance of the test is questionable at best.

 

...According to my friend. I'll try and track down the source. And apparently this was within the last year. Before this fishy event, Mobil 1 was THE oil to use from the majors.

So Nubo, I would expect your Miata to have been just fine in the past, even under hard racing conditions. Also, It's good to remember that ALL oils have improved dramatically over time, so finding any difference at all means your are separating the phenomenal from the merely good. I would not expect engines to be falling apart using any kind of oil on this test....especially any oil that made it on this test to begin with!

Oh and I like your avatar.