Motor Oil Has Changed a lot 60 years

Brian G. NY

Well-known Member
When I was a kid my Dad bought a brand new '52 DeSoto "Fire-Dome' V-8.
He drove about 90 miles round trip to work at the GE plant in Schenectady.
He changed the oil about every 2,500 miles and used nothing but PennzOil.
He always changed his own oil and we saved the oil in 1 gallon glass jugs.
After about six months the contaminants would settle to the bottom and the oil took on the color of dark maple syrup and was clear enuf that you could almost see through it. Not a bit cloudy!
After it settled out, we used the oil for all kinds of lubrication but the only engine we used it in was a little 2HP Briggs engine on a walk behind garden tractor. That little engine ran for years and years using that saved oil.
Oils have improved a great deal since then
and the detergents keep nearly all the contaminants in suspension seemingly forever.
 
It sure has. The old starting engines, vertical 2 cylinder ones, on old caterpillar tractors, have these double and deep sump pits under the crankcase, and it seems it was meant for just that purpose, contaminants settling out, that you can clean, flush etc. when servicing them. Same with oil bath air cleaners, and I have always wondered if those and or any older era applications like these still need to have non detergent oil, or is it just fine to run modern oils, compatible with whatever it is, ie; old tractors or similar.
 
Before detergent oils I remember dad flushing the tractor's crank cases with fuel oil once a year. There hasn't been any need for that for years with the oils we have today. Jim
 
The low sulfur gasoline and diesel of today reduces crankcase contamination. Removing lead from gasoline easily tripled engine life.
 
i have a 52 chevy pu with 110k on the engine and to my knowledge the engine
has never been into, i have owned it for 19 years. minimal oil usage but
recently the oil level started to increase. figured the diaphragm in the
fuel was leaking, so new fuel pump and oil change. drained about 9 quarts
of fuel/oil mixture along with an amazing amount of thick sludge. truck
now runs quieter and with more oil pressure
 
My opinion, retire the non detergent, take advantage of the modern oils.

Only time I would use non detergent is if you knew the history of a very old vehicle, and knew it had always used non detergent, and knew it was caked with sludge that was best left undisturbed, then stay with non detergent. Chances are such a vehicle would be minimally used anyway.

One other practical application of non detergent is in reciprocating compressors. It tends to not develop carbon deposits like detergent oil, or so they say...
 
Pete, What brand fuel pump did you buy? I have had trouble with the pumps I buy for my 51 pick up.
Is yours the splash and hope 216 engine?
Richard in NW SC
Oh, mine has 104000 miles.
 
it is the 216, the fuel pump was an old new stock that came with the truck, allstate brand. for me i would not recommend flushing one like this but it kinda of self-flushed itself. potential problem i may encounter is improper lubrication while driving it and stopping up of oil passages. fortunately it appears i avoided both.
 
B&D, most don't want to hear the real reasons why they get 300,000 now instead of 110,000. Advanced metalurgy,cnc machining and computer controlled fuel management are just a couple others .
 
My uncle drove a 49 Chevy PU with a 216 for YEARS. After it warmed up it had 0 oil pressure and was still running fine when he sold it.
Richard
 
I run non-detergent oil in any small engine that does not have an oil filter. One of my father's friends knew someone who owned a rental business, and he said that using the non-detergent oil increased the engine life of the small briggs engines substantially. Of course, I imagine that these engines were used hard and then set in storage for extended periods, allowing the crud to settle out and stick to the bottom of the pan.
 
I can agree to a point. That said, my problem is that when you reintroduce the exhaust gasses back into the intake side of the system (ie-the EGR system) like they do on the "newer" engines I"ve got to think that all of the benefits gained in the one area, by the fuel changes, are lost by the amount of soot recirculated back. The way I"ve always heard it, the reason a diesels oil turns black in the first place is the amount of soot that gets past the rings and into the crankcase. Make the charge of air going into the cylinder that much dirtier and all it means is that what"s going into the crankcase is even dirtier. One thing about it though, the fact that the oil is black means that it"s doing it"s job and holding the soot in suspension so it can be filtered out.
 
(quoted from post at 23:04:29 04/20/14) my problem is that when you reintroduce the exhaust gasses back into the intake side of the system

Those dirty exhaust gasses just came out of the combustion chamber. Putting them back into the same combustion chamber(s) should not make much of a difference.
 
When I got out of the service I drove a 52 Chev Pickup for years. It had the straight six and a four speed.

The owners manual told you to flush the motor out with K-1 and one quart of new oil. Let the motor run at idle until it was at operating temperature. Drain the mix out and fill with new oil an change the filter.
 

Yes, oil has changed and yet many 70 year old tractors are still around and running after having been run on Non Detergent oils for years?
 
Your right, those "dirty gases" just came out of the combustion chamber. Thing is the gas that initially entered the chamber was clean air, and it didn"t become dirty until the combustion process filled it with the "dirt" created by the burning fuel. In older engines that "dirt" was expelled out the exhaust pipe, but they decided to clean up the exhaust gases by reinjection everything back into the cylinder for another burn. In doing that they are basically putting "dirt" that would have been expelled out the exhaust right back into the engine. Without the newer oils designed to handle the additional chemical complications created by injecting the "dirt" back into the engine, as well as those having the additional additives to handle the larger amount of "dirt" I can"t see the engines lasting nearly as long.
 
The old engines were light stressed. They made 40HP from
300 cubic inches. Now engines with the same sized bearings
make 150HP from the same 300 cu".
 
I'll take you up on that short lived engines . Egr gassers go 300,000 miles with boring regularity. EGR diesels are still running strong after the chassis and frame have been ruined by salt and heavy loads over 100,s of thousands of miles.
 

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