I dont know where to post this, so here goes

This is an old pic from when I did my cam swap. The previous owners never changed the oil like they were supposed to. Any ways heres a pic I want to share to you all.

 

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yup looks all to familiar. my 305 was like that when i got the car...but it was also a blown engine...wonder why. my friends old honda accord went 115,000 miles without an oil change. we pulled the valve cover and timiing chain cover to replace the timing belt and it was nasty. like a chocolate milkshake.

 

Need to relable the thread. "This is what happens when you use penzoil on a regular basis."

 

Oh pullleeezzze, I and millions of others have used Pennzoil for probably longer than you have been alive and it does NOT do any such thing.
Quit spreading ignorance.

 

 

Ahhhhumhmmmmmm.
Ok.

 

My car had penzoil every 3,000 miles for over 90,000 miles with the previous owner until I switched over to mobil 1 and it looked great inside. As long as you do regular oil changes which obviously from the pic, the car didnt have, you will be fine.

 

That is nothing, I just worked on a friends Crown Victoria that had
the same problem but the oil wasn't gooey it was hard. His valve covers were leaking pretty badly, so I offered to change them. That turned out to be useless because the oil return holes in the head were completely plugged, basically the heads were filling up with oil and seeping out the gaskets. His Ford=A miracle of oil pressure, being that it has any at all.

 

kinda looks like my old 305, except it had a blown manifold gasket so the oil looked like a chocolate milk shake.

 

Are you the same guy who started that anti-pennzoil crap in that thread with the TPI on the billboard? That's such BS. Many of us, including my family, have always used Pennzoil with no problem. They havent been around for a billion years and sell a trillion quarts by promoting crappy oil. So you saw an engine like that, that hadn't had its oil changed ever. "Oh, it must be the brand of oil." Quit spewing nonsense.

 

SO that's why my V6 looks like that inside! I swear I could have given some of those chunks of oil to my dog as biscuits if they were edible!

 

Not to spread more oil on the fire, but...

I used Pennzoil GT racing oil back in the '70s and early '80s. That's the way my Pontiacs looked after about two years, and that was with regular oil changes and a working PCV system. While Pontiac heads typically run a little hotter due to exhaust port design, most of that crud started to clear up after switching to Shell Alvania single viscosity oil, and with longer drain intervals. Then again, that was years ago.

As for the theory about selling eleventy-jillion quarts for eons meaning anything about quality, my reply would have to be "Explain why that makes Fram filters any better. They sell cajillions of them, and they're still inferior. Explain Chryslers? Kias? Harbor Freight "tools"? McDonalds? Microsoft? Sales volume doesn't indicate qualitty, only consumer sentiment. That is usually driven purely by myth, consumer perception, and mostly price. AMSOIL has a relatively low sales volume by comparison, but is among the absolute best lubricant you can put in your engine.

Granted, that engine was neglected, and blaming Pennzoil may not be completely fair. After substantial mileage and neglect, that would happen with any kind of lubricant in the sump. If the oil condition had been monitored and the oil changed when it began to break down, that would likely not have happened. Still, in my past experience, Pennzoil didn't last even the 3,000 miles I expected it to. Since changing exclusively to Mobil 1, I wouldn't even try it again. There are a lot more established mineral oils available than what is coming from the merger of Pennzoil/Quaker State.

I'd hate to see what the transmission was like - or the coolant, rear axle, brakes.....

 

They USED to make a good filter.


Also USED to make a good product


Low price and fair quality.

Shouldn't even be in this, they are a monopoly.
Pennzoil is neither a monopoly nor "low priced" and still makes a good product. Not liking a product for personal reasons is fine and dandy, but keep it to yourself, don't bring it here where people come for good sound advice.

 

Excellent Post...
Unless you have the DATA to back up your finding don't be slandering a company because of your personal feelings. If you have not done a study to conclude that this product was causing this problem beyond a reasonable doubt, you are wrong. Also dont go by the hearsay and wives tales. As we learned in elementary school the scienctific method is the true what to come to a conclusion. "USE IT"

 

I used both Quakerstate as well as Pennzoil in my olds and I put well over 65k of abusive miles and it never built up any sludge or deposits with regular change intervals. Just until recently with my 350 i had to have 2k change intervals since the engine ran so dirty. That meant that i bought ALOT of oil and on more then one ocasion the case of oil ( a case of castrol and later quakerstate) that i got was contaminated with sludge or debris meaning that i had to return one and just trash another. I was never a big fan of the quality control they had. I personally feel that most of the conventional mineral oils are about on par and theyll sludge up a motor if it has alot of blowby or the oil is alowed to remain in the crankcase for longer then the suggested change interval. Of coarse, now that my engine is in tune and my oil stays nice and clean, i can change over to synthetics and enjoy a longer change interval and less wear.

 

Morley,

You're right. Fram used to make reasonably good filters. I used to install them pretty extensively without any apparent problems. When Allied Signal acquired the company, the QC seemed to slowly slide. Nothing apparent in several studies seems to indicate that the situation has changed. Even Chrysler, who used to use them exclusively, dropped them quite some time ago (long before being acquired by Daimler-Benz) for some reason. Like Ford terminating its long-standing relationship with Firestone, there must have been some reason.

Ditto Chrysler. They used to make decent engines and VERY good transmissions. Their bodies were always a little suspect, but they were once better than they became in the '80s and '90s. I think they have a chance of improving, if they could just somehow get out of the "Mitsubishi" mentality and start buildig their engines a little heavier. The really disappointing thing for them is that their engineering has a "lofty" target of 150,000 miles of engine life for their newer design V-10s and 8s. Many companies have been producing engines that survive a lot longer than that, and that seems like a pretty low standard to target. The TSBs and frequency of crankshaft failures on the V-10s means they certainly had to do something. If Daimler could infuse a little more R&D and break them away from the "lightweight aluminum" mentality, they might have a chance. If nothing else, they've seemed to hit some prifitable niches in styling, appealing to many of the more whimsical car buyers out there.

Any mineral oil that has a low viscosity base stock and an excess of polymers as viscosity enhancers is going to ash and sludge. The wider the viscosity rating range, the more the likelihood of excess polymers. These are the same polymers that start to break down as soon as the engine gets warm, and continue to do so until they are all burned into ash and sludge. Starting with a lower quality base stock increases the need for additives, and I suspect that some companies use a lower quality base. My experience, old as it may be, and based on no real science, is that Pennzoil created a lot of ash and sludge in my engines. That's all I wrote. As with any lubricant, monitoring its condition and changing it when indicated are just good, sound practice. I didn't get the life I expected from it. Again, that was my experience in my engines. I'd hope that anyone else using Pennzoil would have a better experience, and/or that they would have improved their quality in the last 15 years.

McDonalds? Harbor Freight? Kia? Microsoft? Yes, they may indeed be a "value" when the cost is compared to the need. That's simple economics.

Perhaps the MicroSoft example doesn't belong, but I used it simply to illustrate that volume does not necessarily equal quality. Even though it occupies 80% of the machines out there as an OS, it certainly can't be called the "best" OS available, or other platforms wouldn't exist, and MS wouldn't continue to try to be as much like UNIX as they do. There wouldn't be a hoard of bug fixes, updates, and warnings from Redmond every week, either.

Geez. I didn't mean to torque everyone off at the threads....

 

You didn't.
I was just offering explaination to the examples you listed. What I was trying to point out is that Pennzoil is neither "cheap" (price), a monopoly or that their quality has deteriorated over the years, indeed it has improved in order for them to stay competitive and meet new car mfg. specs.

Oil, politics and religon...3 things people just can't seem to agree upon.

Someone posted a link to an oil study that was done and all of the mineral based oils produced about the same amount of ash and acids, no real "better" one and none worse. Synthetics, by design and chemical makeup do not produce ash, the components for it simply aren't present in them. Still in all I don't/won't use them, I had a very bad exp with synthetic oil that has never happened with any mineral based I've ever used.

 

ouch! i dont like to go over 3,000 miles with out one.

 

Bad experience with synthetics? Please, do tell so that the rest of us can be cautioned. About the only "bad" things I've ever heard are over-cleaning the engine and liberating chunks that the pump couldn't handle, or revealing leakage that oil deposits were masking.

Oh, and lunch. For some reason, many of us can never agree on what's for lunch.

 

I've actually seen worse.

I see newer gm engines with about 30,000 miles with that amount of sludge on them fairly regularly.

 

Well ,when changing my oil pump at 40k miles there were no sludge deposites in the engine at all (pennzoil every 3k miles religiously). At that time there were more synthetic oils avialable, other than mobil 1 and the prices were coming down. So, I decided to give them a try, Castrol synthetic was the "winner". I had drained the oil and cleaned out the pan of all residual oil and filled 'er up when the pan was put back on. I ran it for 2000-2500 miles and decided to change it a little early. The oil came out as black and thick as crude, I took off the filter and it was like pouring honey out of a jar when I up-ended it. This was in the middle of summer in South Carolina (90+ deg), so it wasn't because it was cold. I flushed the entire oil system with kerosene and filled with mineral oil which I ran for 500 miles and changed again.
That was my one and only experiance with synthetic oil and I'm sure it contributed to the early demise of my poor little 305 (#3 main bearing was galled).

That one's easy...if it doesn't move..EAT IT, before your kids get it.

 

Yup, I'll bet that sludge starved at least one bearing. I'm a little surprised the lifters remained quiet, and didn't give you any hints of problems. Your description of the experience sounds like a typical result of mixing incompatible synthetic bases. I know that Mobil and the other major players in synthetic lubrication use mostly PAO base stocks for crankcase lubrication. Polyolester can also be used, but should never be mixed with polyalphaolefin or silicone. I can't say with any certainty, but there may have been some incompatible compounds in the sump. Incidentally, that's another significant reason to NEVER use additives with synthetics. I know you probably didn't do that, but something wasn't quite right with that oil fill, whatever it was.

I'd question the base compound used in Castrol Syntec, or whatever they call their product now, since they are NOT a manufacturer of any synthetic molecules. Mobil was the first mass producer of synthetics for lubrication, and is one of the main three producers today. They've had (and I've used) their synthetics large quantities and varieties of applications for industry since 1984, and the automotive market shortly after that. Not all their products are PAO, but all their automotive lubricants are PAO-based.

 

Why so much sludge so early? Lack of regularly scheduled oil changes?

 

how about COMPLETE lack of oil changes.

 

damn...

 

sounds like our vehicles at work....

we use the cheap napa oil, and they let the oil changes go past 5 or 6k......

one of the vehicles is leased..... then they wonder why the vehicles leak oil

 

thats what makes me laugh, usually these cars are leased vehicles. The owners turn them in with the 30,00 or so miles, without ever changing the oil. Then they get all indignant when they get hit with the fines.

What really makes me laugh is these cars just get an oil change, and then go right back out on the lot. I pity the slob who buys one of them.

We use regular mobil one oil.

 

what dealer do you work for? we deal with martin in downtown warren.

 

they probably wouldnt like that statement i just said about their used cars.

So no, i dont work for martin.

 

I used Pennzoil in my 97 GrandAm for over 100,000 miles before switching to AMSOIL and the motor still runs perfect and looked real clean inside when changing the timing components, and is still going with 200,000+ miles

 

Well Guess some are lucky.

I like Vader have experiance with varnish build up with Penzoil engines. It does seem to work fine in lager engines but smaller displacment engines are a nightmare. The last GM Penzoil engine I pulled apart was a 4.3L in a elcamino. Sludge city and when I showed the owner, he whipped all of his service records from the past 15 years from behind the seat to show me that the oil was changed on a normal basis. Last engine I did was a 2.9L ranger two weeks ago, came in with a dead lifter. Pulled the valve cover, crud, pulled the intake and sludge was covering the entire lifter valley. My Sister in laws new used 74 camaro, got the valve cover pulled last night to check head casting, 77, 60cc heads. Service records cam with the car form 3 years, oil used 10-30w Penziol, 10-30w quaker state. All of the oil return holes are plugged soild. about 2 quarts of oil spewed from the valve covers when they were removed. The oil was ruturning to the crankcase VIA the pushrod slots. Heads looked similiar to the OP's pic.

Synthetics. Ive had bad kuck with Castrol Syntec. The crap seeks leaks. I used it in my truck the last time, changed the pan gasket sunday. The inside looked nice and clean after its 3k run but I know the oil broke down long before 3000 miles.

 

Like stated, my engine looked and still looks great. The family van and truck still use it and they both look great as well and the truck is VERY abused. I switched to mobil 1, not to keep the gunk out, but for more power that synthetics free up.

 

good, cause i despise dealing with martin chevy.

i had really good luck dealing with a sales man at wollam chevy in cortland. a friend's truck was wrecked, and insurance was trying to total it. i called several dealerships, wollam was the only one to give me used pricing info without trying to cram a brand new truck down my throat.

 

I can't pretend to have that much long-term experience (like Vader and such), but my dad has always bought pennzoil cases, so I automatically use that, and have never had a problem with sludge or anything.

 

this is about pointless