Originally Posted By: btanchors
Question though - how do I get the lot number off of the Mobil 1 jug that I drew the sample from? I do see some numbers on the back label, but I vaguely recall you have to use an ultraviolet light or something to see the entire lot number.
I'm going to take a stab at this. It's just a guess, you understand, based upon the relative ease we've become accustomed to regarding getting information from XOM.
Chill the jug to exactly 0C. Shine a UV lamp which includes the 300nm wavelength on the area just above the barcode. Simultaneously, hit it with a 530nm green light source. (Laser pointers using LiNb03 nonlinear crystal final stages are generally close enough.)
You'll see an interference pattern. (The invisible label is holographic.) The pattern can be interpreted as a binary code. Dark line pairs which are close together are 1's. Dark line pairs which are farther apart are 0's. Group the digits into groups of 8 and write down the resulting 12 decimal digits.
Find an IBM EBCDIC table (most CS texts from the late 1970s or before should include one in the appendix) and decode each of the decimal values (which should all be in the range of 193 to 249) into their regular GB English character representations. That's the number you're looking for.
Note that the above procedure may constitute a DMCA violation unless you have an NDA on file with XOM.
You can do something similar for Pennzoil products. But instead of using UV light, a specific frequency of green light, an interference pattern, and doing an EBCDIC translation, you can read the numbers off of the back of the bottle, using any light in the usual optical wavelengths, and write them down. It's a little simpler, because Pennzoil doesn't have the factory-fill synthetic market sewn up, and has been forced to innovate something simpler.
The above is, of course, intended humorously.
Seriously, though... your efforts on this are appreciated. I'm particularly interested in what's going on with the M1 AFE 0w20. I'm betting that the new formulation has significantly more molybdenum. But that's just a wild prediction on my part.
Regarding the UV light... it would not surprise me in the least, coming from XOM.