winter oil
Rookie
Joined: Jan 2005
Posts: 50
Likes: 0
RE: winter oil
No, Mobil 1's warranty is for 5,000 miles or 15,000 miles depending on which Mobil 1 oil you get. Amsoil's warranty for the 5W-30 oil is for 25,000 miles or one year (whichever occures first). I currently run the Amsoil 0W-30 High Performance oil and the warranty is for 35,000 miles or one year.
One interesting thing about Mobil 1 that I just found out, is that it isn't a true synthetic oil, but instead a Group III petroleum oil. They changed from synthetic to petroleum in 1999. A couple of years earlier Castrol came out with a synthetic oil that was a Group III petroleum oil and Mobil sued them for false advertising. Mobil lost the law suit in 1999 and so reformulated all their synthetic oils. So if your synthetic oil cost less than $6.00 a quart more than likely it is actually a Group III pertroleum oil not synthetic.
Tom
One interesting thing about Mobil 1 that I just found out, is that it isn't a true synthetic oil, but instead a Group III petroleum oil. They changed from synthetic to petroleum in 1999. A couple of years earlier Castrol came out with a synthetic oil that was a Group III petroleum oil and Mobil sued them for false advertising. Mobil lost the law suit in 1999 and so reformulated all their synthetic oils. So if your synthetic oil cost less than $6.00 a quart more than likely it is actually a Group III pertroleum oil not synthetic.
Tom
Record Breaker
Joined: Sep 2004
Posts: 1,750
Likes: 0
RE: winter oil
ORIGINAL: tcv
No, Mobil 1's warranty is for 5,000 miles or 15,000 miles depending on which Mobil 1 oil you get. Amsoil's warranty for the 5W-30 oil is for 25,000 miles or one year (whichever occures first). I currently run the Amsoil 0W-30 High Performance oil and the warranty is for 35,000 miles or one year.
One interesting thing about Mobil 1 that I just found out, is that it isn't a true synthetic oil, but instead a Group III petroleum oil. They changed from synthetic to petroleum in 1999. A couple of years earlier Castrol came out with a synthetic oil that was a Group III petroleum oil and Mobil sued them for false advertising. Mobil lost the law suit in 1999 and so reformulated all their synthetic oils. So if your synthetic oil cost less than $6.00 a quart more than likely it is actually a Group III pertroleum oil not synthetic.
Tom
No, Mobil 1's warranty is for 5,000 miles or 15,000 miles depending on which Mobil 1 oil you get. Amsoil's warranty for the 5W-30 oil is for 25,000 miles or one year (whichever occures first). I currently run the Amsoil 0W-30 High Performance oil and the warranty is for 35,000 miles or one year.
One interesting thing about Mobil 1 that I just found out, is that it isn't a true synthetic oil, but instead a Group III petroleum oil. They changed from synthetic to petroleum in 1999. A couple of years earlier Castrol came out with a synthetic oil that was a Group III petroleum oil and Mobil sued them for false advertising. Mobil lost the law suit in 1999 and so reformulated all their synthetic oils. So if your synthetic oil cost less than $6.00 a quart more than likely it is actually a Group III pertroleum oil not synthetic.
Tom
Rookie
Joined: Jan 2005
Posts: 50
Likes: 0
RE: winter oil
I can't find the link to the website. I originally linked to the article "All About Oil" from a Motorcycle forum. I did copy the article and below is the portion that I referred to. If I find the website I will post that as well.
Tom
All About Oil
I am not a lubrication, filtering, chemical or mechanical engineer. I have a degree in engineering, but I studied electrical engineering. I now study physics. You may feel free to question my abilities to gather facts and draw conclusions in the area of oils and filters. In any case, this is a write up of what I learned in about 60 hours of research on this topic. If your eyes glaze over in science classes and you simply wish there were someone with a science background and no financial interest in oils and filters who would do all the leg work for you, you can skip to the section on Oil Filters. My only interest is having my motorcycle run forever, never break, and be easy to maintain.
Where Oil Comes From
Most of the bio-mass on earth is single cell plants and microscopic critters in the ocean. When these die, they sink to the bottom. Often they fall into a deep crevasse or trench, where they may become covered up by an underwater landslide. After a couple hundred million years of high pressure and no air, the critters get squished into oil. So, oil isn't really "dead dinosaurs," but Sinclair Oil stations just wouldn't be the same with a picture of algie on their sign. Today we like to find this stuff, pump it to the surface, and burn it.
The oil we pump to the surface is a mixture of gasoline, kerosene, light weight lubricating oil, motor oil, gear oil, tars, pariffins, waxes, asphalt, sand, dirt, organic stuff (called aromatics) and the occasional dead cockroach. The oil companies have the singularly smelly job of separating the raw oil into its component parts. A hundred years ago we would just heat the stuff up in a complicated still, and catch stuff that boiled off at different temperatures. Fifty years ago we started processing the raw oil with clay and solvents to do a more precise job. Today, we use very complicated systems where we heat the raw oil to precise temperatures, put it under high pressure, and bubble hydrogen and other stuff through it. The idea of all this is to try to get pure chemicals out of this stuff that we just found laying around in the desert.
Most motor oil has a lot of different chemicals in it with very different properties. The temperature at which the oil will start burning, called the flash point, is determined by the chemicals that burn at the lowest temperature. The higher the flash point, the more stable the oil is at high temperatures, and the less oil your engine will burn. The pour point is the temperature at which the oil stops flowing like a liquid. The lower this number is, the better protected your engine is when it's cold. The thickness of the oil, that is the resistance the oil offers to motion, is called the viscosity. The viscosity depends on all of the various chemicals in the oil and how they react to each other and to heat. If you could get only one precise kind of molecule out of the raw oil, you could do a lot better.
Refining Oil
The oil product you buy starts as a base oil. These base oils are colorless and pretty much odorless and are sold to the public as mineral oil. There are currently 5 classes of base oil, called Group I, II, III, IV, and V. Group I oil is refined the old-fashioned way using clay and solvents, and is used in about 2/3 of the oil sold in America today. In 1990, Chevron developed a new method of refining base oils called Hydrocracking, where you process the raw oil at high temperatures and pressures with hydrogen to try to eliminate more of the unwanted sulpher, nitrogen, and aromatic compounds. Base oils made with this method are called Group II, and are significantly more pure and have higher performance than Group I base oils. Chevron Delo 400, Delvac 1300, and Shell Rotella are made from pure Group II oils.
Since 1990, Chevron's process has been improved on. By increasing the severity of the hydrocracking process, raising the temperature and pressure to distill out more and more of the unwanted chemicals, the viscosity index (VI) can be improved further. The VI tells us how much the oil thins out as it gets hot. Oils with higher VIs maintain their viscosity better at high temperatures. If the VI is 90 to 100, we call it Group II; if it's refined to a VI of 110 to 115 we call it Group IIa. In the last five years or so, an even more involved process has been invented yielding base oils with VIs over 120. These are called Group III or "unconventional base oils." The higher the VI, the fewer additives are necessary to achieve the required viscosity. For example fewer additives are needed to turn a Group III base oil into 10w-40 than are required for Group II base oils. These Group III oils have properties approaching synthetics, so long as the temperature is above about 50°. In fact, most of the "synthetic oil" you can buy today is actually mostly made of this highly-distilled and purified dino-juice called Group III oil. The much more expensive traditional synthetics are now only available in more expensive and harder to obtain oils.
In the late 1990s, Castrol started selling an oil made from Group III base oil and called it SynTec Full Synthetic. Mobil sued Castrol, asserting that this oil was not synthetic, but simply a highly refined petroleum oil, and therefore it was false advertising to call it synthetic. In 1999, Mobil lost their lawsuit. It was decided that the word "synthetic" was a marketing term and referred to properties, not to production methods or ingredients. Castrol continues to make SynTec out of Group III base oils, that is highly purified oil with most all of the cockroach bits removed.
Shortly after Mobil lost their lawsuit, most oil companies started reformulating their synthetic oils to use Group III base stocks instead of PAOs or diester stocks. Group III base oils cost about half as much as the synthetics. In fact, Mobil-1 is now primarily made from Group III unconventional base oils, exactly the stuff Mobil was claiming was not really synthetic. These Group III based oils are often claimed to not perform as well as synthetics. Also, since Group III "synthetics" are based on petroleum oils, they contain impurities that produce ash, unlike synthetics which have no nitrogen or aromatic compounds. AMSOil, Golden Spectro, Delvac-1, and Shell Rotella Synthetic contain no Group III base oils. Had I been the Judge, Mobil would have won their lawsuit, and Mobil-1 would still be a true synthetic oil.
Synthetic Oils
Synthetic oils were originally designed for the purpose of having a very pure base oil with excellent properties. By starting from scratch and building up your oil molecules from little pieces, you can pretty much guarantee that every molecule in the oil is just like every other molecule, and therefore the properties are exactly what you designed in, not compromised by impurities from dead cockroach shells or whatever.
One process for making synthetic base oils is to start with a chemical called an olefin, and make new molecules by attaching them to each other in long chains, hence "poly." The primary advantage of Poly-Alpha-Olefin "PAO" base oil is that all the molecules in the base oil are pretty much identical, so it's easy to get the base oil to behave exactly as you like. PAOs are called Group IV base oils.
Another type of base oil made from refined and processed esters is called Group V. Also, there are new chemicals emerging which are made from liquefied natural gas called GTL (gas to liquid) base oils. These will perhaps be called Group VI, and many people think they will become an important part of the oils you buy within a few years.
Semi-synthetics are oils which are a blend of petroleum oil and no more than 30% synthetic oil. If the manufacturer adds no more than 30% synthetic oil and does not change the additive package, they do not have to recertify the oil. These days, since everyone has agreed that Group III base oils are "synthetic," I'm not sure "semi-synthetic" means anything at all.
Tom
All About Oil
I am not a lubrication, filtering, chemical or mechanical engineer. I have a degree in engineering, but I studied electrical engineering. I now study physics. You may feel free to question my abilities to gather facts and draw conclusions in the area of oils and filters. In any case, this is a write up of what I learned in about 60 hours of research on this topic. If your eyes glaze over in science classes and you simply wish there were someone with a science background and no financial interest in oils and filters who would do all the leg work for you, you can skip to the section on Oil Filters. My only interest is having my motorcycle run forever, never break, and be easy to maintain.
Where Oil Comes From
Most of the bio-mass on earth is single cell plants and microscopic critters in the ocean. When these die, they sink to the bottom. Often they fall into a deep crevasse or trench, where they may become covered up by an underwater landslide. After a couple hundred million years of high pressure and no air, the critters get squished into oil. So, oil isn't really "dead dinosaurs," but Sinclair Oil stations just wouldn't be the same with a picture of algie on their sign. Today we like to find this stuff, pump it to the surface, and burn it.
The oil we pump to the surface is a mixture of gasoline, kerosene, light weight lubricating oil, motor oil, gear oil, tars, pariffins, waxes, asphalt, sand, dirt, organic stuff (called aromatics) and the occasional dead cockroach. The oil companies have the singularly smelly job of separating the raw oil into its component parts. A hundred years ago we would just heat the stuff up in a complicated still, and catch stuff that boiled off at different temperatures. Fifty years ago we started processing the raw oil with clay and solvents to do a more precise job. Today, we use very complicated systems where we heat the raw oil to precise temperatures, put it under high pressure, and bubble hydrogen and other stuff through it. The idea of all this is to try to get pure chemicals out of this stuff that we just found laying around in the desert.
Most motor oil has a lot of different chemicals in it with very different properties. The temperature at which the oil will start burning, called the flash point, is determined by the chemicals that burn at the lowest temperature. The higher the flash point, the more stable the oil is at high temperatures, and the less oil your engine will burn. The pour point is the temperature at which the oil stops flowing like a liquid. The lower this number is, the better protected your engine is when it's cold. The thickness of the oil, that is the resistance the oil offers to motion, is called the viscosity. The viscosity depends on all of the various chemicals in the oil and how they react to each other and to heat. If you could get only one precise kind of molecule out of the raw oil, you could do a lot better.
Refining Oil
The oil product you buy starts as a base oil. These base oils are colorless and pretty much odorless and are sold to the public as mineral oil. There are currently 5 classes of base oil, called Group I, II, III, IV, and V. Group I oil is refined the old-fashioned way using clay and solvents, and is used in about 2/3 of the oil sold in America today. In 1990, Chevron developed a new method of refining base oils called Hydrocracking, where you process the raw oil at high temperatures and pressures with hydrogen to try to eliminate more of the unwanted sulpher, nitrogen, and aromatic compounds. Base oils made with this method are called Group II, and are significantly more pure and have higher performance than Group I base oils. Chevron Delo 400, Delvac 1300, and Shell Rotella are made from pure Group II oils.
Since 1990, Chevron's process has been improved on. By increasing the severity of the hydrocracking process, raising the temperature and pressure to distill out more and more of the unwanted chemicals, the viscosity index (VI) can be improved further. The VI tells us how much the oil thins out as it gets hot. Oils with higher VIs maintain their viscosity better at high temperatures. If the VI is 90 to 100, we call it Group II; if it's refined to a VI of 110 to 115 we call it Group IIa. In the last five years or so, an even more involved process has been invented yielding base oils with VIs over 120. These are called Group III or "unconventional base oils." The higher the VI, the fewer additives are necessary to achieve the required viscosity. For example fewer additives are needed to turn a Group III base oil into 10w-40 than are required for Group II base oils. These Group III oils have properties approaching synthetics, so long as the temperature is above about 50°. In fact, most of the "synthetic oil" you can buy today is actually mostly made of this highly-distilled and purified dino-juice called Group III oil. The much more expensive traditional synthetics are now only available in more expensive and harder to obtain oils.
In the late 1990s, Castrol started selling an oil made from Group III base oil and called it SynTec Full Synthetic. Mobil sued Castrol, asserting that this oil was not synthetic, but simply a highly refined petroleum oil, and therefore it was false advertising to call it synthetic. In 1999, Mobil lost their lawsuit. It was decided that the word "synthetic" was a marketing term and referred to properties, not to production methods or ingredients. Castrol continues to make SynTec out of Group III base oils, that is highly purified oil with most all of the cockroach bits removed.
Shortly after Mobil lost their lawsuit, most oil companies started reformulating their synthetic oils to use Group III base stocks instead of PAOs or diester stocks. Group III base oils cost about half as much as the synthetics. In fact, Mobil-1 is now primarily made from Group III unconventional base oils, exactly the stuff Mobil was claiming was not really synthetic. These Group III based oils are often claimed to not perform as well as synthetics. Also, since Group III "synthetics" are based on petroleum oils, they contain impurities that produce ash, unlike synthetics which have no nitrogen or aromatic compounds. AMSOil, Golden Spectro, Delvac-1, and Shell Rotella Synthetic contain no Group III base oils. Had I been the Judge, Mobil would have won their lawsuit, and Mobil-1 would still be a true synthetic oil.
Synthetic Oils
Synthetic oils were originally designed for the purpose of having a very pure base oil with excellent properties. By starting from scratch and building up your oil molecules from little pieces, you can pretty much guarantee that every molecule in the oil is just like every other molecule, and therefore the properties are exactly what you designed in, not compromised by impurities from dead cockroach shells or whatever.
One process for making synthetic base oils is to start with a chemical called an olefin, and make new molecules by attaching them to each other in long chains, hence "poly." The primary advantage of Poly-Alpha-Olefin "PAO" base oil is that all the molecules in the base oil are pretty much identical, so it's easy to get the base oil to behave exactly as you like. PAOs are called Group IV base oils.
Another type of base oil made from refined and processed esters is called Group V. Also, there are new chemicals emerging which are made from liquefied natural gas called GTL (gas to liquid) base oils. These will perhaps be called Group VI, and many people think they will become an important part of the oils you buy within a few years.
Semi-synthetics are oils which are a blend of petroleum oil and no more than 30% synthetic oil. If the manufacturer adds no more than 30% synthetic oil and does not change the additive package, they do not have to recertify the oil. These days, since everyone has agreed that Group III base oils are "synthetic," I'm not sure "semi-synthetic" means anything at all.
Rookie
Joined: Jan 2005
Posts: 50
Likes: 0
RE: winter oil
The following wedsite is where I got the writeup "All About Oil"
http://www.micapeak.com/bike/ST/ST1300/Oils.htm
Tom
http://www.micapeak.com/bike/ST/ST1300/Oils.htm
Tom