synthetic oil?

[barrys]

How would someone blow an engine by trying to get another 1000 miles out of 5 quarts of oil? I'm just a novice. It seems like pushing your oil out another 20% on wear would might give you mildly greater wear across the board over time if you're crossing an oil breakdown line in usage. Maybe after 150K worth of changes, you'd be more at risk for a lubrication failure. But (for like the 5th time), used oil analysis is an amazingly great way to spend 25.00 (blackstonelabs.com seems to do a good job and they're all over bobistheoilguy.com). You learn alot about your motor and how it's using/abusing your oil. Without that data, it's all just guessing.

In reading tons of posts about why 3.0's crap out (which is rare and seems to take a long time), I have not read a single story about an engine failing due to oil related issues when the owner has done even reasonable frequency oil changes.

All that said, if you're pushing your changes out to 8K, then that's about the most people seem to get on dino oil (just hear this empirically after reading lots of posts on the bobistheoilguy page -- that forum is insane...). The synthetic blend is a happy medium and most car companies are using that as stock with oil changes in the 7-10K mi range.

Changing at 3K (which I do religiously) is starting to seem like a real dumb-ass idea. But, I just can't help myself.

 

[Froggmann]

Motorcraft Synthetic blend is hard to beat. A 5 quart jug of 5w-20 is $12 at Wally world. I switched over at 140k miles and love the oil, change it every 5k-5500 miles.