yes marvels mystery oils active ingredient is oil of wintergreen which is an old school penetrant oil that does work well to free up lifters and such however it was widely used on older "pre cat engines and I dont know what kind of effect it will have On those components...I have a 40year old bottle of the stuff I found in my closet a couple weeks ago...you can smell the wintergreen..

as for the restore.... here are some testimonials from people who have used it... some have reported before and after compression ratings. Turns out I didnt even use it right becuse I usually added it drove for a bit and then changed the oil. the stuffs not a miracle worker but it can help. As for the stop leak it appears it can cause damage if not used right according to a lot of what I'm reading.
http://www.hotrodders.com/forum/engi...ork-71649.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6QPQAU88DI

 

Okay, thanks. I appreciate the clarification.

Just so it's said and said just once, here's my brief treatise on magic fix-it fluids, some of which has been said by others in the time it's taken me to do some of this, some of that, and some typing away here:

Most of the cool oil additives on the market are just motor oil (usually around 50w) into which more of the same stuff your motor oil already contains is added -- ZDDP, some sulfur compound, detergent, and so on. ZDDP is interesting stuff because at lower concentrations (less than 0.1% IIRC) it's miraculous stuff for reducing friction and wear but at just above that low concentration it's actually harmful and causes metals to become brittle. Sulfur, when it gets really hot and especially really hot and pressurized, bonds to the metal it comes into contact with, filling in micro-cracks and hardening the metal.

That scroungy looking yellow/tan crud that you get on your dipstick when there's water in your oil? It's water trapped by the detergent additive. Detergents are molecules that are hydrophilic on one end and hydrophobic on the other, and so allow oil and water to mix. In your kitchen sink you wash oil away with water; in your engine you wash water away with oil. The rub? More detergent in your motor oil means more capacity to hold water in suspension, and more water in suspension means reduced lubrication. You want some detergent in your oil to carry water out of friction interfaces but you don't want so much that it significantly reduces lubrication.

And that's where the addition of sulfur gets tricky. The more sulfur in the oil, the more sulfuric acid you make when it reacts with the water.

Me? I don't know, but I think it stands to reason that if adding more and more stuff to motor oil was a good idea, the good folks at Valvoline would add more and more stuff and throw a marketing campaign at it so they could capture all of those consumer dollars that are instead going to the additives folks.

If I've got a leaky seal that for some reason I can't replace soon, or a sticky lifter, I'll just replace a quart of motor oil with a quart of cheap Dexron ATF at the next oil change. It'll swell the seal or wash the crap out of that lifter almost every time. And it's cheap, too. If I did it for a sticky lifter I don't worry about it once it's freed, but if it was for a leaky seal I start looking for my round tuit. There's just no magic yet invented that will make a worn seal new again. Seal swelling goodies are just stop gaps.

Radiator stop leak will quite often stop the leak, but will almost always settle out in the lower reaches of the block water jacket. I've seen this many times: You remove a block drain and nothing pours out, so you whip out your handy dandy frayed steel cable to run up in there to break up the rust. You run it around, pushing and twisting and cussing, but the only thing that comes out is a frayed steel cable with Bar's Leaks on the end. The only way to get that crap out is to hot tank the block. I carry a tube of Aluma-Seal in my toolbox but I won't use it unless it's a potentially life threatening situation in which I've decided that something is more important than my engine.

That's the sum of what I've got to say. End of rant.

 

I use ZDDP additives in my VW because of the flat tappet cam its works well in older pre emmisions setups.. and oils once had much higher amounts of it when those engines were being produced and heavily used.. they remove it from modern SM an newer grade oils and the results are quicker wear on the cam....
Its a big no no in cat equipt vehicles ...it also takes out o2 sensors I'm told..by plugging them up.
as for the radiator stuff...I thought you were supposed to add it while the engine was up to temp and moving the fluid to prevent t it from just settling at the bottom? what you say totally makes sense and I guess thats the reason I only used one application of the stuff even though it didnt completly seal off my leak (it reduced it a lot though) I wonder if I had some partial blockage and thats why my engine appears to run cooler now according to the gauge?

 

Most of the radiator stop leak crap that is out there is some variety of solid that is carried in suspension in the coolant, until it finds a hole, and is exposed to air, then it drys out/cures/solidifies in whatever fashion. The rest of it is still working its way around in your cooling system, that is, of course, until you turn off the truck, and the coolant.... cools. Then all that crap settles out, and accumulates. As there isn't a lot of turbulent flow inside the engine, the usual result it, stuff stays where it settles.

 

Marvel Mystery Oil is a mixture of kerosene and transmission fluid.
Don't know about putting it in oil. Never have.
I use Mystery oil in my lawnmower, weed eater and tiller for a fuel stabilizer when storing for the winter. Never have had any problems firing up equipment in the summer so I guess it does have some "mysterious properties".

Tranny fluid is basically a light weight oil with a ton of detergent in it.