Oil virtually run dry! :-(

Focus diesels run about 20psi at max torque (2000rpm) according to my pressure gauge. Tickover I'm lucky to see more than about 8psi and it seems fine driving away at that.

My understanding of film generation (and thanks for the excellent post - snipped due to length) was that a sufficient flow was needed to the bearing to generate the wedge but pressure feed was more or less irrelevant. I know that it's not loaded the same as a big end but I;ve had bikes with a maximum pressure of 3 or 4 psi and plain bearings on the camshafts. Big ends were journal rollers though of course.

Well yes. You'd have to do an electrics check every trailer change. As for the rest I check weekly having established the general rate of decay of the various items. The car never loses oil between changes (3 monthly/6k miles), the tyres need pumping only every month or so and so on. Still check em weekly though.

The pressures just to get the oil there, the faster you spin the bearing the more oil it sprays out , so you need a higher feed pressure. HOwever I suspect that the higher pressures are to the cam lobes lubricated, not the big ends.

Yes & if it hasn't got any then it won't start & you won't see burnt blue oil smoke out the back.

That's what I think too.

The message from Grimly Curmudgeon contains these words:

Oi! Some of us still /aspire/ to SOCs.

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Guy King saying something like:

I've still got one... it's a SOJC [1], though, so utterly boring and bland in its shiteness. It just goes, every day, on and on.

I bought it to take the strain off the Tranny - no point in running the van into the ground when a SOC can do the unpaid mileage.

Chris Street wrote: [snip]

The engine form that became popular after SV ;¬)

Yes, I will.

Indeed I shall do the basic checks as before, albeit perhaps more frequently. While some weeks the car gets

And if you had a newsreader that threaded posts properly you'd have realised that at this point in the thread he hadn't mentioned that.

Why is it? You wouldn't know as you've not checked anything.

I'm using a first class newsreader thank you.

Ian stated that his car was laid up in MID date stamped 31/1/05 at 22:28

You called him a prick in MID date stamped 1/2/05 at

Perhaps you should consider reading all the unread posts in a thread before launching into one of your immature outbursts. In any case, I think you owe Ian an apology.

You may be such a sad doley arse that you have the time to end up readintg things twice but I don't.

Thats up to Ian to ask for or are you his bitch?

Wrong again.

No one mentioned reading things twice. Reading it once might have helped you in this case.

Any decent bloke wouldn't need to be asked but you obviously don't fall into that category

Oh, FFS Conor! You are infering that because I did not check the oil in twelve hundred miles, then it must follow that I never check the tyres, brakes or even lights! *That* is why.

It usually follows especially as from a financial POV, checking the oil is more important than checking a sidelight bulb.. Experience in the motor trade plus listening to the comments of people I encounter re- enforce it.

Depends on the car, those that use hardly any oil aren't worth checking, thoose that do are.

Um, how do you know if it uses oil, if you don't check? Do you wait for the costly grinding of metal on metal, or are you just guessing?

Really, I'd love to hear the logic behind your statement.

Cheers,