Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
Blackstone was afraid of teams of oil company lawyers bothering them, so they totally ignored the small differences in their own bar charts, and put that statement in there so they couldn't be accused of having brand-specific favoritism.
The reality is that Mobil1 regular-type is nothing special on wear rates, and you can do somewhere between 10% to 20% better on wear results using many other oils.
The data uses enough cases to make it statistically accurate enough.
Using 2 different engines was nice too. On both engine groups, Mobil1 was about the worst you could do.
Regular Mobil1 doesn't impress me much based on that data. I'm assuming Mobil1 EP and AP could be better.
Now is the 10%-20% worse wear expected from Mobil1-regular significant to most of us? Maybe. I certainly don't want more wear. I prefer less wear.
To quote myself and Tom:
Originally Posted By: Tom NJ
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Folks still cling to this ideal that they can UOA themselves into the golden seat of oily goodness using a tool designed to determine lubricant suitability for continued use. That it can divine them the "best" oil for their engine and we'll ignore that formulations change, wear profiles change and the fact that you aren't even measuring just wear, as the Redline quote above clearly demonstrates and experts in the subject have stated many times.
It's the allure of the $20 full-on engine tear-down substitution. The fallacy (or perhaps in this case, fantasy) that a consumer-sampled bottom-of-the-ladder analysis with all of the controls, methods and statistical rigour of an ADHD squirrel on methamphetamine, provides valuable, statistically comparable information that one can then use to "fine tune" their oil selection.... In most cases, from a list of lubricants that all passed the exact same API, OEM and often ACEA test protocols.
+1 It's a trend monitoring tool, never intended to compare and rank different oils from random uncontrolled engines.
Motor oil performance is properly measured by carefully controlled and standardized engine and fleet tests, calibrated with known reference oils and operated under severe worse-case conditions. Results from these tests are then compared to standard specifications established by industry organizations and OEMs, and the oils are ranked into performance categories such as SN, GF-5, etc. for consumers to select from according to their engines and driving conditions.
We don't have access to such engine and fleet data, so being an oil forum driven by a "Quest for the Best" mentality, we tend to try to predict relative oil performance from the published physical properties and personal UOAs. Fun and entertaining, but not scientifically valid.
Our real objective is to not suffer an oil related engine problem during the time we intend to keep our vehicles. This cannot be predicted by splitting hairs in physical properties and UOA ppm comparisons. If it could the oil companies would not be spending millions of dollars running controlled and standardized engine tests.
Originally Posted By: Tom NJ
Furthermore I prefer API certified oils that I know have been tested in standardized engines and passed all parameters. I use Mobil 1 mainly because their Extended Performance grade provides me comfort in annual oil changes, and also because of their use of expensive Groups III+, IV and V base oils, again a focus on performance over lower cost Group III only based synthetic oils. There are other oils that would meet my criteria, but I have no reason to change.
Originally Posted By: Redline
Unfortunately, oil analysis is not very good at distinguishing wear between different formulations. Emission spectroscopy has a particle size limit of 3 to 5 microns, which means that particles larger will not be detected. Unfortunately, most serious wear issues generate wear particles in the range of 5 - 15 microns. Oil analysis only measures about 15-20% of the particles in the oil, and changing form one formulation to another is likely to change the particle size profile. Usually formulations with more antiwear additive will more aggressively react with the metal surface and when rubbing occurs will produce smaller particles. Generally, more antiwear additives will give greater iron spectrochemical numbers, even though the total iron can be lower. There are other techniques such as ferrography, which looks at the wear particles under a microscope, but now we are talking about analysis many times more expensive than spectrochemical analysis. The oils with the better spectrochemical numbers will be much less chemically active on the metal surface, so they will be less able to handle more severe loads. There is always a trade-off between chemical wear and adhesive wear. Chemical wear is the very small particles and soluble metals which is identified in the spectrochemical analysis, while adhesive wear is many orders of magnitude greater than the chemical wear, but much is not identified in spectrochemical analysis. But if you were using spectrochemical analysis as a maintenance tool and started seeing a deviation over the baseline, then you would know something was wrong.
It is very difficult for an individual to be able to look at numbers which will conclusively determine the best formulation, you simply have to rely on the reputation of the marketer and whether you trust the marketer's technical expertise. With most of our formulations, we rely on major additive manufacturers to do the basic API sequence testing to determine criteria such as antiwear, dispersancy, cleanliness, etc. All the oil companies rely on the additive manufacturers to do the engine test work. We will take their basic package and add additional antiwear, friction modifiers, oxidation inhibitors or whatever can be safely modified to provide superior performance. Some of the bench tests such as 4-Ball can be useful, but a blind adherance to optimize with one single test will result a less-than-optimum performing lubricant. There are always trade-offs in engine oils, and we try to enhance antiwear and friction reduction at higher temperatures and loads, while trying to maintain performance at lower and normal loads and temperatures.
We've got a test not designed to provide wear data for the purpose of performance contrast being used, crudely, in that manner, despite statements made by experts in the field like Tom. The desire for UOA's to be this precision instrument for determining the "best" oil is so strong that it doesn't seem to matter how many times folks in the industry state it can't be used for that purpose, there are still those trying to drive that screw in with a hammer.
