for the guys that are into recreational oil changing...

What did you do about it, Bill, and what was the result? This sort of chicanery has been found at dealerships, quick change franchises, and independent shops. I hope it isnt widespread, but it DOES happen.

At our company's fleet garage, we bought "bulk" oil, but it came packaged in 55 gallon drums. It was never delivered in a tank truck and pumped into an open bulk tank.

This level of "bulk" was substantially cheaper than buying bottled oil, and the risk of contamination was less.

In my mother's situation, I raised hell at the dealership. I did allow them to do the oil and filter change along with an apology. I do all of the work on my own cars, so it's not like I could tell them I wasn't going to do business with them again. And when the opportunity arises in the community, I tell them about what happened. For unrelated reasons, my mother sold that car just a very few months later, so what to do about her future oil changes became moot.

On the Jeep that my daughter bought, I let the previous owner know that her wonderful next door neighbor that managed the neighborhood Amerilube had been ripping her off for years and suggested that she check the other vehicles she owned that had been serviced there. Of course she could have been giving me a complete line of B.S. the whole time, but I doubt a person lieing about it would have made up the bit about the next door neighbor being the manager of the Amerilube that supposedly had done all the oil/filter changes. If she was telling the truth, hopefully the next door neighbor lost some business and reputation (personal and business) over it.

The chain of excellence, of course.

so fix the damned thing! that's not a function of temperature, that's a function of excess fuel.

that's a bullshit underinformed differentiation. all modern motor oils are detergent. it's the detergent that's hygroscopic, so you can't avoid it.

besides, synthetics flow better when cold, thus they are a better choice, not worse.

and there we have it folks - always check this stuff.

oils, especially conventionals, break down and start to lose their ability to hold contaminants in suspension after a while - mostly as a function of time and temperature. conventionals more quickly than synthetics. this is why you /should/ check and change your oil.

but with monitoring and use of quality lubricants, you can safely use significantly extended service intervals. i eat my own dogfood:

eh??? have you any idea how long it takes to get a drug approved? how much testing is involved? [rhetorical - because you clearly don't.]

no, tests provide proof. inability to pay attention to that proof is idiocy.

yeah, i'm the guy that makes s*it happen. you're the idiot that just stands about with your thumb up your ass bitching about stuff you don't understand.

fresh oil. even 90% fresh oil [a low dilution rate] is indistinguishable in performance from 100%.

you "disagree" with the facts?????? where can we find your contrary research published?

on my civic & crx, i've been using the st3593a filter from woolmort. made here in the u.s. by champion labs, the same people that make filters for bosch and mobil labels.

they claim efficiency like this:

filters help, but they're not the only thing - oil stability and chemistry is important too.

generally, it's not if you leave the motor to stand for an hour before you spin the filter off. try this yourself.

amen, brother.

with conventional oil....

he doesn't know because he's just guessing - he has no data.

does it matter if you're getting ripped off?

ok, if mobil will go 20k miles per actual usage:

Ya, really, JT. I think most of us hangin' here happily doing the car talk thing are public school folks. ;-)

____________________________________________________________________

Using a Latin signoff motto has become a fad because it gives a writer an air of learning. Lucy Kellaway, a columnist for Financial Times, experimented with converting modern expressions to Latin. One of her samples was the expression, ''call a spade a spade''. The translation came back: ''nomina rutrum rutrum''.

Some who see the world in black and white have copied and adopted this Latinized signoff as their own. Whenever you see someone using this expression to suggest an air of learning, remember that it was conceived as a joke, and that its true translation is: ''call a shovel a shovel''.

Rodan. ______________________________________________________________