About a month ago it was time to change the oil in the minivan, so I trooped on down to Walmart and picked up a 5 Qt jug of Castrol GTX 5W-30 High mileage and stopped at NAPA for a gold filter. This is a 2000 Chrysler Grand Voyager SE w/ 3.3L Flex Fuel @ 95,000 miles. I've been pretty religous about doing this thing every 3000-4000 miles for an oil change, mainly becuase I purchased it with 68,000 on the clock and wasn't really sure about how it had been taken care of previously. Looked clean and drove good, but dealers can do wizardry with a rig these days. I've always fed it a steady diet of Valvoline Durablend 5W-30 with a Castrol GTX 5W-30 every now and then. This last time I decided to try the high mileage seeing as it was over 90,000 miles and see if it would help a little startup tick that had developed over the last 10,000 miles. Well, today the wife's leaving to go run around and I notice a decent puff of the blue smoke from the tailpipe on startup. I had her shut it off and peeked around to make sure no leaks or anything might have caused it. I found nothing and had her start it up again, and once more after just sitting for maybe 90 seconds, It gave the startup puff again. Could this be caused by the high mileage oil? It actually claims on the bottle to have superior burn-off protection (besides revitalizing seals and such). This engine has never had the puff before that I've ever noticed and uses somewhere between 1/4-1/2 Qt range every 3000-4000 miles. In my book this is very good. While a little smoke on startup isn't the end of the world, it means that guides/seals are starting to not perform very well and I'm starting to see the downside of this engines life. I was hoping to make at least 150,000 before running into this but it seems this is not to be. I just find it hard to believe that high mileage oil designed for engines over 75K would cause this. I've never had a UOA done on the engine and don't know if it would provide any insight as to what might be causing it. I wonder if an ARX treatment would help or hurt her at this stage.
*Edit*
I found this Spec sheet on Castrols website but I have no idea what most of this stuff means (if anything useful)
Castrol High Mileage .pdf Spec Sheet
[ October 23, 2005, 02:38 PM: Message edited by: JParrott ]
*Edit*
I found this Spec sheet on Castrols website but I have no idea what most of this stuff means (if anything useful)
Castrol High Mileage .pdf Spec Sheet
[ October 23, 2005, 02:38 PM: Message edited by: JParrott ]