Wow. I am really surprised how much quieter my engine is. Oil pressure is a little higher at idle too.

I have never used Mobil 1 in any of my vehicles until today. I thought my van deserved special treatment since it went 2700 miles on my trip.

The tiny little ticks and clacks, while would be unheard by the untrained ear, I was always able to hear. They are mostly gone now.

Is Mobil 1 really this good?

 

Usually changing the oil with anything will make the engine sound slightly better.

On the BITOG forums, M1 is usually considered to make most engines noisier, and in used oil analysis', the PPM of Iron in the oil usually increases by a few PPM over other oils.

If you have a stock oil pressure gauge, trust it as much as you would a used car salesman. Oils can shear to lighter weights as the viscosity index improvers break down, so new oil is usually slightly thicker than the same brand/weight as just drained. as long as the oil consumption is not excessive
and the oil change interval too long.

Also, oils can just fall within a grade when new but shear right out of it, or if running rich or just doing too much short trip driving will get thinner due to fuel dilution, as the engine runs richer when cold, and if the rings are old, lets more fuel into the oil.

That Said, I am running M1 0w-40 in my engine, and it is the quietest oil I have yet used, my previous oils being M1 TDT 5w-40 and M1 10w-40 HM and before that, going back 7 years castrol GTX and Valvoline white bottle in the 10w-40 flavors. The synthetics stopped lifter tapping on startup and are the main reason I continue with them.

All these oils are thicker than they need to be.

My oil pump bypass pressure(62PSI) is reached at 2000 rpm with the oil as hot as it gets. Still trying to work my way down to a 30 weight, but old habits and incorrect knowledge have a way of sticking around.

At hot idle(550 rpm) I will see about 18 psi with new hot oil, and with 2k miles on it, I will see 15 to 16 psi in the same conditions. The TDT 5w-40 was slightly higher, and the 10-40 hm was highest of all, rarely falling below 19, even at the end of an oil change interval.

Oil pressure is not a more is better, it is a as long as the minimum is exceeded, all is well with that part of the system. If more was always better, we should run straight Lucas oil stabilizer and the oil pump bypass and oil filter bypass would always be in bypass, and our engines would eat themselves dry on every cold start as lucas has zero antiwear, extreme pressure or detergent additives. It is well a marketed snake oil thickener.

 

My story and 2 cents worth...

I have been using M1 and more recently other brand synthetics in all of my vehicles since at least the year 2000. I used Castor Oil synthetic blend for a number of years prior to that, when I stuck with 3-4K mile oil changes as used to be recommended. It was a little more than 1/2 the price of a full synthetic back then, about $18/gal where M1 was about $30 as I recall.

I have 4 vehicles, the newest being my B2500 '01 van. There is only the wife and I and we have been retired now from a daily job for 2 years. Even when we were working, it was hard to put 10K miles on a vehicle in 12 months, usually closer to 7 or 8K miles. I did not want to be changing oil every 6 months, so I decided to start using synthetic and began changing oil once a year. Been doing this since about 2000. M1 was my first choice back then.

These days I purchase whatever synthetic is on sale and I must say that over the years the price of these synthetic oils in general has come down. In the 12+ years I have been using these oils, I have been very pleased with the performance of all of them.

Up until spring of 2006, I always drove my '94 B250 extended van on a 3,000 mile round trip to Canada each summer to do some remote camping and fishing for 2 to 3 weeks at a time. That old gal with the 5.9 would pull a V-hull boat loaded with gear for 3 or 4 people without a whimper and did so for 11 years . I wrecked her in a driving rain, rear ending a big box truck that bent the frame, otherwise I might still be driving that sweet van. I figure I owed that accident to improperly setup and misadjusted rear brakes and a full load of furniture I was helping a friend move that day.

My other three cars are Toyotas... a '96 Tacoma, my wife's '01 Solara and a '97 Land Cruiser, all bought used. All three are in great shape engine wise and I would not hesitate to drive any one of them cross-country as they sit, even though every auto I own has somewhere in the 150,000-170,000 mile range on the odometer. Not an oil user in the bunch. Well the Land Cruiser has a rear oil seal problem, but I solve that each time with a jar of Bar's Stop Leak, Rear Main Seal Repair additive, which has just about stopped that leak cold.

I might also add that I have been adding to all of my engines an additive called Motor Kote for about the past 5 years. http://motorkote.com/
Until the last year this stuff has been pricy and hard to find, but it is now carried in Walmart and very recently the price has come down some. I like to listen to the overnight trucking radio program carried on my local radio station WLW 700AM, http://www.700wlw.com/main.html
and everyone on this call-in channel sings the praises of this line of products... actually I can never recall anyone giving it a bad rap. I use it in all of my 4 stroke engines, from a Kubota farm tractor to my lawn mowers.

I had an unemployed friend, that picked up a rural road newspaper delivery route (many miles, but not a lot of money) a few years back when he became unemployed. His old car was a real smoker, and leaked oil from most every place it could. He used my old drained oil for a couple of years to keep his vehicle running... never changing oil, just always adding. I now give my used motor oil to a friend that filters it and burns it in a high-tech oil burning heater that keeps his shop warm all winter.

As I said, not very scientific, but I have been very pleased with synthetics in general for at least since the year 2000.