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Engine Oil
How about this new Corvette Z06? With four hundred and five horsepower on tap, this car's got more than enough energy to melt Akron's finest in nothing flat. This is one of the few cars that comes from the factory with synthetic engine lubricant in the crankcase. And that's what the engineers specify for this high performance engine. The car, truck, van or sport utility that you're driving in all likelihood specifies conventional engine oil. No matter what type of engine oil you're using however, the idea of using a quality engine lubricant, quality filters, keeping it full and changing it at the prescribed intervals is to make sure that the engine doesn't wear out before its time.
This week, we want to go to our cut-away engine and identify some of those areas where wear takes place. And as your vehicle gains miles and years, a little bit of wear is inevitable and unavoidable. But we're going to show you where that wear takes place and show you a product that can help you deal with some of the problems that go along with that wear.
Here's our cut-away engine. This is a V-6 that's found in a lot of GM vans, pickups and sport utilities. Because it's cut away in this area, we can see into the combustion chamber, we can see the exhaust valve and intake valve and part of the cylinder area. We've also got the valve cover off up here so you can see the valve train, the rocker arms, the push rods, the tip of the valve right here, the valve springs and, down inside here, the valve guide. And where you can't see inside here, there's a seal as well. When our engine's running, a lot of engine oil comes up these hollow push-rods, exits that little hole in the rocker arm, it lubricates the pivot point on our rocker arm and it cools and cleans these parts as well.
You can see the tip of the valve right there and these are the valve springs that close the valve. Every time that valve goes up and down a little bit of wear takes place in our engine right in here in the area that we call the valve guide. There's a little seal just like this one I'm holding in my hand on the tip of the valve guide, and the valve itself goes through there and this seal tries to prevent oil from going down the stem of the valve and entering our combustion chamber right here.
It's inevitable that a little bit of wear takes place in this guide and in this seal. When it does, and engine oil enters the combustion chamber right here, it'll cause deposits to form on our valve which hampers performance. And, if enough oil gets into the combustion chamber you'll see a little bit of blue smoke in the exhaust when you first start the engine in the morning. And, also, you're going to need some make-up oil in the crankcase because the oil that enters here is removed from the engine oil that's in the crankcase.
So you're going to have to add oil to your engine. On the other side of our engine, the oil pan is cut away so that we can see through and see the crankshaft right here. That's one of the counterweights on the crank and, as I turn it further, we can see two of the connecting rods. And remember that the crankshaft has about 30 PSI of oil pressure fed to it by the engine oil pump.
And the oil that is slung off these conrod bearings flies up off the connecting rods and hits the cylinder wall of the engine right up in this area right here. And that lubricates the cylinder wall, the piston skirt and the piston rings and we can see our three piston rings, our oil control ring here, the scraper ring and the compression ring. And these piston rings are subject to a fair bit of wear if you don't use a quality lubricant or if you don't have good quality air filter in your engine.
A certain amount of engine wear is inevitable. Sooner or later, enough years and enough miles on that engine, it's going to start to consume a bit of oil; you're going to start to get some of the signs that you've got a bit of wear going on in that engine. Here's a product that you can now use to help you fight some of these problems. The valve seals that I told you about earlier? They get hard and they're no longer compliant enough to seal the valve guides of the engine and the valve stems. This engine oil will help soften them, condition them, such that they'll make a more effective seal. It's also a little bit more viscous than the engine oil you may be using right now, so it'll give you a little bit better engine oil pressure down in the bottom end of the engine and a little bit more effective seal in the cylinder wall areas so you get better compression and better performance out of the engine.
My pickup truck, for example, has got very high mileage on it. It's got three hundred and thirty-six thousand kilometres. Because it's been well-maintained, it's not at the level where it's using engine oil. But when your car gets to the point where it starts to consume a significant amount of engine oil, here's one thing that may be able to help you out and stave off the inevitable, which is rebuilding that engine.
'Til next week, I'm Bill Gardiner for Motoring 2002.
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