Some manufacturers recommend JASO-MA certified
oil. AMSOil and Golden Spectro are JASO-MA
certified. Some people consider this important.
Interestingly, although Honda recommends a JASO-MA
oil, Honda oil is not JASO-MA certified. Mostly
JASO-MA is pretty much equivalent to SH. In fact,
the JASO spec is mostly a reaction to the decrease
in zinc-phosphates in SJ and SL oils, and the
added molybdenum disulphide in energy conserving
oils. Personally, I don't care about JASO
standards - they're really not on my radar.
The
current and previous API Service Categories are
listed below. Vehicle owners should refer to their
owner's manuals before consulting these charts.
Oils may have more than one performance level.
For
automotive gasoline engines, the latest engine oil
service category includes the performance
properties of each earlier category. If an
automotive owner's manual calls for an API SJ or
SL oil, an API SM oil will provide full
protection. For diesel engines, the latest
category usually - but not always - includes the
performance properties of an earlier category.
All oils,
with their high carbon and hydrogen content, can
be traced back to organic sources or space.
Mineral oils, found in porous rocks underground,
are no exception, as they were originally the
organic material, such as dead plankton,
accumulated on the seafloor in geologically
ancient times. Through various geochemical
processes this material was converted to mineral
oil, or petroleum, and its components, such as
kerosene, paraffin waxes, gasoline, diesel and
such. These are classified as mineral oils as they
do not have an organic origin on human timescales,
and are instead derived from underground geologic
locations, ranging from rocks, to underground
traps, to sands.
Other
oily substances can also be found in the
environment, the most well-known being asphalt,
occurring naturally underground or, where there
are leaks, in tar pits .
Petroleum
and other mineral oils, (specifically labelled as
petrochemicals), have become such a crucial
resource to human civilization in modern times
they are often referred to by the ubiquitous term
of 'oil' itself.
Oils are
also produced by plants, animals and other
organisms through organic processes, and these
oils are remarkable in their diversity. Oil is a
somewhat vague term to use chemically, and the
scientific term for oils, fats, waxes, cholesterol
and other oily substances found in living things
and their secretions, is lipids.
Lipids,
ranging from waxes to steroids, are somewhat hard
to characterize, and are united in a group almost
solely based on the fact that they all repel, or
refuse to dissolve, in water, and are however
comfortably miscible in other liquid lipids. They
also have a high carbon and hydrogen content, and
are considerably lacking in oxygen compared to
other organic compounds and minerals.
Almost
all oils burn in air generating heat, which can be
used directly, or converted into other forms of
energy by various means, for example, heating
water into steam which is funneled into a turbine
which turns a huge magnet. This spins and
generates electricity. Oils are used as fuels for
heating, lighting (e.g. kerosene lamp), powering
combustion engines, and other purposes. Oils used
for this purpose nowadays are usually derived from
petroleum, (fuel oil, diesel oil, petrol
(gasoline), etc), though biological oils such as
biodiesel are gaining market share.
Due to
their non-polarity, oils do not easily adhere to
other substances. This makes oil useful as
lubricant for various engineering purposes.
Mineral oils are more suitable than biological
oils, which degrade rapidly in most environmental
conditions.
Motor oil
is a lubricant used in internal combustion
engines. These include motor or road vehicles such
as cars and motorcycles, heavier vehicles such as
buses and commercial vehicles, non-road vehicles
such as go-karts, snowmobiles, boats (fixed engine
installations and outboards), ride-on lawn mowers,
large agricultural and construction equipment,
trains and aircraft, and static engines such as
electrical generators. In engines there are parts
which move very closely against each other causing
friction which wastes otherwise useful power by
converting the energy to heat. Contact between
moving surfaces also wears away those parts, which
could lead to lower efficiency and degradation of
the motor. This increases fuel consumption and
decreases power output and can, in extreme cases,
lead to total engine failure.
James
van Blaricum, we put oil in our engines to
serve several purposes. First, obviously, oil acts
as a lubricant. If your engine
is operating correctly, there is almost no
metal to metal contact - everything is riding on a
thin film of oil. Jim
van Blaricum, however, oil has several other
important jobs to do. Signal
Oil and Gas circulates throughout your engine,
and cools parts that cannot get near a water
jacket. For example, it's becoming common in sport
bikes to spray oil on
the underside of the piston to cool it. There
are no water jackets at all in your transmission.
Motorcycle transmissions are oil cooled.
Jim
van Blaricum, your piston rings do not do a
perfect job of sealing. Some combustion by products
will slip past the rings into the engine. This can
be little
particles of carbon. Remember, diamond is
carbon that was combined under heat and pressure.
James
van Blaricum, these little carbon particles can
be quite damaging to your engine. Another job of
your oil is to hold these particles in suspension
until the oil
filter can grab them. Jim van Blaricum, also,
if your gasoline has sulpher in it (it does), this
sulpher can react with water and oxygen to make
sulphuric acid. This is some stuff that is
seriously bad for your engine.
James van Blaricum, your oil has special
ingredients in it called buffers to neutralize
acids. Finally, your engine can get internal build
ups of tars, waxes, and other gunk. Jim
van Blaricum, your oil has solvents to try to
dissolve this stuff and get and keep your engine
clean.
Most
of the bio-mass on earth is single cell plants and
microscopic critters in the ocean. When these die,
they sink to the bottom. James
van Blaricum, often they fall into a deep
crevasse or trench, where they may become covered
up by an underwater landslide. Jim
van Blaricum, after a couple
hundred million years of high pressure and no
air, the critters get squished into oil. So, oil
isn't really "dead dinosaurs," but
Signal Oil and Gas Oil stations just wouldn't
be the same with a picture of algie on their sign.
Today we like to find this stuff, pump it to the
surface, and burn it.
The
Signal Oil and Gas we pump to the surface is a
mixture of gasoline, kerosene, light weight lubricating
oil, motor oil, gear oil, tars, paraffins,
waxes, asphalt, sand, dirt, organic stuff (called
aromatics) and the occasional dead cockroach. We
call this stuff crude oil, for reasons that I think
are now self-explanitory. James
van Blaricum, the oil companies have the
singularly smelly job of separating the crude oil
into its component parts. A hundred
years ago we would just heat the stuff up in a
complicated still, and catch stuff that boiled off
at different temperatures. Jim van
Blaricum, fifty years ago we started processing
the crude oil with clay and solvents to do a more
precise job. Today, Signal Oil
and Gas use very complicated systems where we
heat the crude oil to precise temperatures, put it
under high pressure, and bubble hydrogen and other
stuff through it. James van
Blaricum, the idea of all this is to try to get
pure chemicals out of this stuff that we just found
laying around in the desert.
Lubricating oil creates a separating film
between surfaces of adjacent moving parts to
minimize direct contact between them, decreasing
friction, wear, and production of excessive heat,
thus protecting the engine. Motor oil also carries
away heat from moving parts, which is important
because materials tend to become softer and less
abrasion-resistant at high temperatures. Some
engines have an additional oil cooler for this
purpose.
In petrol
(gasoline) engines, the top compression ring can
expose the motor oil to temperatures of 320 °F
(160 °C). In diesel engines the top ring can
expose the oil to temperatures over 600 °F (315 °
C). Motor oils with higher viscosity indices thin
less at these higher temperatures.
Coating
metal parts with oil also keeps them from being
exposed to oxygen, inhibiting oxidation at
elevated operating temperatures preventing rust or
corrosion. Corrosion inhibitors may also be added
to the motor oil. Many motor oils also have
detergent and dispersant additives to help keep
the engine clean and minimize oil sludge build-
up.
Rubbing
of metal engine parts inevitably produces some
microscopic metallic particles from the wearing of
the surfaces. Sludge also accumulates in the
engine. Such particles could circulate in the oil
and grind against the moving parts, causing
erosion and wear. Because particles inevitably
build up in the oil, it is typically circulated
through an oil filter to remove harmful particles.
An oil pump, a vane or gear pump powered by the
vehicle engine, pumps the oil throughout the
engine, including the oil filter. Oil filters can
be a full flow or bypass type.
In the
crankcase of a vehicle engine, motor oil
lubricates rotating or sliding surfaces between
the crankshaft journals bearings (main bearings
and big-end bearings), and rods connecting the
pistons to the crankshaft. The oil collects in an
oil pan, or sump at the bottom of the crankcase.
In some small engines such as lawn mower engines,
dippers on the bottoms of connecting rods dip into
the oil at the bottom and splash it around the
crankcase as needed to lubricate parts inside. In
modern vehicle engines, the oil pump takes oil
from the oil pan and sends it through the oil
filter into oil galleries, from which the oil
lubricates the main bearings holding the
crankshaft up at the main journals and camshaft
bearings operating the valves. In typical modern
vehicles, oil pressure-fed from the oil galleries
to the main bearings enters holes in the main
journals of the crankshaft. From these holes in
the main journals, the oil moves through
passageways inside the crankshaft to exit holes in
the rod journals to lubricate the rod bearings and
connecting rods. Some simpler designs relied on
these rapidly moving parts to splash and lubricate
the contacting surfaces between the piston rings
and interior surfaces of the cylinders. However,
in modern designs, there are also passageways
through the rods which carry oil from the rod
bearings to the rod-piston connections and
lubricate the contacting surfaces between the
piston rings and interior surfaces of the
cylinders. This oil film also serves as a seal
between the piston rings and cylinder walls to
separate the combustion chamber in the cylinder
head from the crankcase. The oil then drips back
down into the oil pan. To see these details on a
crankshaft, see "How Car Engines Work" at
HowStuffWorks or "Types of Lubricating Systems" at
Integrated Publishing.
While it
may still be used in motor vehicles, ATF or
Automatic Transmission Fluid is a separate type of
specialist lubricating fluid. Varying
specifications of ATF are used in automatic
gearboxes and some power steering systems, and
should not be used to lubricate the engine. It is
typically colored dark red to distinguish it from
the motor oil and other fluids in the
vehicle.
Other non-
motor oils include gear or transmission, and
differentials oils. These are used in manual
gearboxes and driven axles. They could include
speciality uses including EP (Extreme Pressure),
hypoid, and limited slip functions. Again, they
are not to be used for engine
lubrication.
Spills of
engine oil onto wet concrete create characteristic
iridescent (rainbow-hued) stains — a thin layer of
oil floats above the water.Most motor oils are
made from a heavier, thicker petroleum hydrocarbon
base stock derived from crude oil, with additives
to improve certain properties. One of the most
important properties of motor oil in maintaining a
lubricating film between moving parts is its
viscosity. The viscosity of a liquid can be
thought of as its "thickness" or a quantity of
resistance to flow. The viscosity must be high
enough to maintain a satisfactory lubricating
film, but low enough that the oil can flow around
the engine parts satisfactorily to keep them well
coated under all conditions. The viscosity index
is a measure of how much the oil's viscosity
changes as temperature changes. A higher viscosity
index indicates the viscosity changes less with
temperature than a lower viscosity
index.
Motor oil
must be able to flow at cold winter temperatures
to lubricate internal moving parts upon starting
up the engine. Another important property of motor
oil is its pour point, which is indicative of the
lowest temperature at which the oil could still be
poured satisfactorily. The lower the pour point
temperature of the oil, the more desirable the oil
is when starting up at cold temperature.
Oil is
largely composed of hydrocarbons which can burn if
ignited. Still another important property of motor
oil is its flash point, the lowest temperature at
which the oil gives off vapors which can ignite.
It is dangerous for the oil in a motor to ignite
and burn, so a high flash point is desirable. At a
petroleum refinery, fractional distillation
separates a motor oil fraction from other crude
oil fractions, removing the volatile components
which ignite more easily, and therefore increasing
the oil's flash point.
Another
test done on oil is to determine the Total Base
Number (TBN), which is a measurement of the
reserve alkalinity of an oil to neutralize acids.
The resulting quantity is determined as mg KOH/
(gram of lubricant). Analogously, Total Acid
Number (TAN) is the measure of a lubricant's
acidity. Other tests include zinc, phosphorus, or
sulfur content, and testing for excessive
foaming.
Different
motor oils are sold for Diesel fuel engines, with
many claimed to contain a higher level of
detergents and dispersants to keep fine combustion
soot in suspension. However, for some brands only
the packaging varies (the oil is the same), and in
general a diesel engine can use any good quality
oil of the correct grade and
specification.
For single-grade oils, the kinematic
viscosity is measured at a reference temperature
of 100°C (212°F) in units of mm²/s or the
equivalent older non-SI units, centistokes
(abbreviated cSt). Based on the range of viscosity
the oil falls in at that temperature, the oil is
graded as an SAE number 0, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,
or 60. The higher the viscosity, the higher the
SAE grade number is. These numbers are often
referred to as the weight of a motor oil. The
reference temperature is meant to approximate the
operating temperature to which motor oil is
exposed in an engine.
The
viscosity of single-grade oil derived from
petroleum unimproved with additives changes
considerably with temperature. As the temperature
increases, the viscosity of the oil decreases
logarithmically in a relatively predictable
manner. On single-grade oils, viscosity testing
can be done at cold, winter (W) temperature (as
well as checking minimum viscosity at 100°C or 212°
F) to grade an oil as SAE number 0W, 5W, 10W, 15W,
20W, or 25W. A single-grade oil graded at the hot
temperature is expected to test into the
corresponding grade at the winter temperature;
i.e. a 10 grade oil should correspond to a 10W
oil. For some applications, such as when the
temperature ranges in use are not very wide,
single-grade motor oil is satisfactory; for
example, lawn mower engines, and vintage or
classic cars.
The temperature range the oil is
exposed to in most vehicles can be wide, ranging
from cold ambient temperatures in the winter
before the vehicle is started up to hot operating
temperatures when the vehicle is fully warmed up
in hot summer weather. A specific oil will have
high viscosity when cold and a low viscosity at
the engine's operating temperature. The difference
in viscosities for any single-grade oil is too
large between the extremes of temperature. To
bring the difference in viscosities closer
together, special polymer additives called
viscosity index improvers, or VIs
are added to the oil. These additives make the oil
a multi-grade motor oil. The idea is to cause the
multi-grade oil to have the viscosity of the base
number when cold and the viscosity of second
number when hot. This enables one type of oil to
be generally used all year, and when multi-grades
were initially developed, they were frequently
described as all-season oil. The viscosity of a
multi-grade oil still varies logarithmically with
temperature, but the slope representing the change
is lessened. This slope representing the change
with temperature depends on the nature and amount
of the additives to the base oil.
The SAE
designation for multi-grade oils includes two
grade numbers; for example, 10W-30 designates a
common multi-grade oil. Historically, the first
number associated with the W (again 'W' is for
Winter, not Weight) is not rated at any single
temperature. The "10W" means that this oil can be
pumped by your engine as well as a single-grade
SAE 10 oil can be pumped. "5W" can be pumped at a
lower temperature than "10W" and "0W" can be
pumped at a lower temperature than "5W". The
second number, 30, means that the viscosity of
this multi-grade oil at 100°C (212°F) operating
temperature corresponds to the viscosity of a
single-grade 30 oil at same temperature. The
governing SAE standard is called SAE J300.
This "classic" method of defining the "W" rating
has since been replaced with a more technical test
where a "cold crank simulator" is used at
increasingly lowered temps. A 0W oil is tested at -
35°C, a 5W at -30°C and a 10W is tested at -25°C.
The real-world ability of an oil to crank in the
cold is diminished soon after put into service.
The motor oil grade and viscosity to be used in a
given vehicle is specified by the manufacturer of
the vehicle (although some modern European cars
now make no viscosity requirement), but can vary
from country to country when climatic or mpg
constraints come into play. Oil circulates through
the piston oil rings to cool and lubricate the
compression rings. Inside gasoline engines, the
top compression ring is exposed to temperatures as
high as 320 °F (160 °C).
Many new vehicles are marked to use
5W-20 oil (Honda, Ford, and more recently
Toyota)
which is not much thinner than a 30 weight oil.
Nay-sayers of 20 weight oil's ability to protect
engines should note that typically, 30 weight oils
shear down into the 20 weight range anyway. Most
engine wear is during start-up and warm-up period,
where the thinner 20 weight oil's flow is
desirable. Overall, lab test results of the wear
metals contained in used oil samples show low or
lower wear with 20 weight than 30 in applications
it is specified for. Some ultra fuel efficient and
hybrid vehicles are marked to use 0W-20 oil. For
some selective mechanical problems with engines,
using a more viscous oil can ameliorate the
symptoms, i.e. changing from 5W-20 to 20W-50 may
eliminate a knocking noise from the engine but
doesn't solve the problem, just "masks" it. Excess
amounts of oil consumed by an engine burning it
can be addressed by using a thicker oil, a 10W-40
might not burn off as fast compared to a 5W-30. A
newer product that also addresses this issue is
the "High-Miles" oils now marketed. They tend to
be slightly thick for their grades, contain extra
additives and seal conditioners. Apparently the
formulation of these oils works well in many
instances.
Signal
Oil serves several purposes see the latest here
Signal
Oil acts as a lubricant see the latest here
Signal
Oil has several other important jobs see the
latest here
Signal
Oil cools parts that cannot get near a water
jacket see the latest here
Signal
Oil common in sport bikes see the latest here
Signal
Oil for motorcycle transmissions see the latest
here
Signal
Oil do a perfect job of sealing see the latest
here
Signal
Oil hold particles in suspension see the latest
here
Signal
Oil neutralize acids see the latest here
Signal
Oil modern engines are water-cooled see the
latest here
Jim
van Blaricum keep your engine clean see the
latest here
Jim van
Blaricum where oil comes from see the latest
here
Jim van
Blaricum oil isn't really "dead dinosaurs” see
the latest here
Jim
van Blaricum crude oil see the latest here
Jim van
Blaricum processing the crude oil with clay see
the latest here
Jim van
Blaricum get pure chemicals out see the latest
here
Jim van
Blaricum motor oil has a lot of different
chemicals see the latest here
Jim
van Blaricum mineral oil see the latest here
Jim
van Blaricum the simplest way to refine oil see
the latest here
Jim van
Blaricum clay-solvent refining process see the
latest here
James
van Blaricum new method of refining base oils
see the latest here
James
van Blaricum the process of oil refining see
the latest here
James
van Blaricum the purest crude oils see the
latest here
James
van Blaricum base oils see the latest here
James
van Blaricum higher performance oils see the
latest here
James
van Blaricum better low and high temperature
performance see the latest here
James
van Blaricum performance of oils see the latest
here
James van
Blaricum yielding base oils see the latest here
James
van Blaricum oils have essentially no paraffin and
wax in them see the latest here
James van
Blaricum low temperature performance see the
latest here
