read about oil today

[94touring]

In case anyone didn't notice, I have a lot of free time at work.  At any rate I've been wanting to switch to royal purple synthetic like I run in my rotary but then the debate of why you shouldn't arises.  20w50 mineral oil being the best choice for the gearbox.  After hours of reading I learned two main things.  The gearbox breaks down the polymers in the oil and zddp levels have been lowered over the years which is also bad for engine wear.  Then I discovered that bike engines share gearboxes as well and have specially formulated oil for that reason.  After further reading found that max cycle royal purple synthetic bike oil has high levels of zddp.  In fact most of their oils do.  I'm not seeing any drawbacks to switching to this.  Thoughts from the rest of you?

[MiniDave]

I run Brad Penn oil, it's reasonable priced and easy to get - the local oil dist. keeps it in stock. I pay $62/case for either 10W40 or 20W50 and it has high levels of ZDDP also.

You definitely want something like that tho to save your camshaft

[94touring]

Some interesting data.

[94touring]

It would seem the amsoil bike oil has the best results.  1400 and some change on the zddp too. 

[MtyMous]

I use Rotella T6 full synthetic in my mini. I've done a whole write-up somewhere on MiniMania.

[Flyinace2000]

I've been using Valvoline VR1 20W-50 which also has a high ZDDP content.

[94touring]

I ended up putting in RP synthetic bike oil last oil change.  So far so good. 

[MtyMous]

If you really want to know your oil is doing and not guess, you should send your oil off for an oil analysis at blackstone labs. I've had multiple analyses done by them and it has proven that synthetics with high zinc and phosphorus content do really well in our cars. Specifically for a shared gearbox oil setup. The high shear resistance of synthetics is by design. Standard oils use a lot of VI improvers to get wide range multi-grades like 10-40 or 20-50. These VI improvers aren't used as much (if at all) in synthetics. VI improvers are long chain polymers which shear when forced through tight tolerance points like high pressure galleries and between gears. this is the real benefit of synthetic in our setup.

I've done way too much research on my oil. I've argued for synthetics until I was blue in the face on other forums. lol. My advice now is for people to always get an oil test. Save a small amount of virgin oil from the bottle and send it in with your dirty oil at the same time so you can get a before/after snapshot. You'll be surprised by how much they can tell you about your car just by a dirty oil sample. And they will recommend what to look for in an oil to help deal with your trouble areas.

[DS1980]

You can also get ZDDP-in-a-box, if you want to stick with a specific brand.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/5-ZDDPlus-ZDDP-Engine-Oil-Additive-Save-your-Engine-/351304005544?hash=item51cb59b7a8&vxp=mtr

Getting more technical, an aviation company called ASL makes a product called Camguard. It has aviation and auto grade variants. The difference being the aviation grade has about twice the "good stuff," which is ZDDP as well as some other ingredients good for older engines (aircraft engines are dinosaurs). This has been independently tested by a well respected member of the aviation community named Mike Busch, with the findings showing that it simply reduces wear on all parts of the engine.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASL-CamGuard-Advanced-Oil-Supplement-Aviation-1-Pint-/161012890670?hash=item257d1dbc2e&vxp=mtr