Duralube, slick50, lubegard

There is absolutely no reason to use any of those products.

I use Valvoline.Any good name brand of engine oil is just as good, your choice. cuhulin

Yes, you did, but no, you did not.

I used to use Castrol GTX with a Marvel Mystery oil chaser, 3.5 qts Castrol and 1 qt MMO. This worked fine for many years.

Until I bought a 1989 Mazda 626 a couple years ago. Developed and nasty clacking that has been attributed to Hydraulic Lash Adjusters. For 50 bucks I bought 4 HLAs and for a few dollars more I bought some Quaker State High Mileage oil with Slick 50 already mixed in.

For laughs I did an oil change with the QS as a last ditch, since i didn't want to go pulling the HLAs...

Brought the HLAs back, got my money back, and haven't bought another set yet. The oil cleared up the clacking problem on the first turn of the key.

This is news to me.. The high mileage oils use polymers for viscosity control and for gasket conditioning, but AFAIK it is not the micronized PTFE that has been the basis of Slick 50.

Mind you, I don't take the position that Slick 50 doesn't work for anything, but it has not been proven to me that it does (or doesn't).. And I believe that was the basis of the lawsuit...claims which had not been adequately verified.

In essence, that wormy "Doctor Doo" who pitches for colon cleansing on national TV is doing the same thing. He may believe it, but he hasn't proved it, does not look like a poster boy for clean colons, is making money off his contra medical pronouncements. Slick 50 did much the same with their ads.

Well, it's entirely possible the effect was from the High Mileage Oil formulation and that the Slick 50 didn't have anything to do with it.

It seems to be a harmless placebo. That's more than you can say for the colon cleansing products on TV.

--scott

It does, pretty much. If any of these products really worked well, they'd be using them for industrial machinery where the cost of repair is far higher than with a car and where products that can extend the life of bearing surfaces would pay for themselves even if they only extended the life by hours.

I don't think any of them do any harm, mind you, and you should feel free to use them if you think they will help you, but there's some pretty good research saying they don't.

The issue with the teflon powder is really not a serious one, but the teflon particles can be trapped by varnish and engine buildup and make the buildup problems worse. The Slick-50 propaganda says that somehow the teflon is supposed to impregnate surfaces but it doesn't really explain how. The solution for that is to keep your engine clean.

The chlorinated hydrocarbon issue is that the stuff forms hydrochloric acid. That's okay if you have proper pH buffering... in fact, most base oils will become very acidic after use in an engine, that's why we have additives to prevent that.

I don't think there are really any problems with any of these products when used in a clean engine, other than financial ones.

--scott

___________________ They're like Daylight Saving Time: every virtue of the dad-gum thing has a vice!

LOL...

___________________ Those commercials are really a pain in the a$$.

tv commercials,,, That's why I keep the MUTE button handy. cuhulin

Teflon CAN and does impregnate or coat metal surfaces, but it is not clear that this effect leads to any real benefits in automobiles. I saw this effect in some tests that we were doing to measure corrosion on steel surfaces. That it occurs is documented (or at least documentable). The data resides in corporation archives.

But is it valuable?? I really dont know. We were not interested in this effect, as such, and never tried to run with it. I did some other tests years later in which the micronized PTFE was SUPPOSED to impregnate surfaces and give a high temperature high pressure lubricity effect. It gave a little performance, but was not good enough for what we were doing.

Other materials, sulfur rich organics, gave many many times the improvement that PTFE did, in this particular simulation.

Amen!