For those of you who use Castrol....

[JR'Z 525]

have you looked in the bottom of one of the quart bottles after putting it in your engine? Try looking in it next time. Looks like some of the additives might be settling out. I have used Castrol since the 1970's and I noticed this a few years ago. If you shake it up before you pour it seems to mix back in the oil. The post from earlier about Toyota Camry engines sludging up makes me really want to go to Mobil1 in the wife's V6 Camry and glad I already did in the 525. Any comments? Anyone else notice this?
John R

[632 Regal]

I saw crap in the bottom of a few different bottles of stuff (motor oil, trans, Psteering) I dont know if its just residual crap of part of the composition, either way I have a very fine mesh funnel deal that takes it out.

Never thought about it but next time I see this im gonna fire up juniors microscope and see if i can tell what it is.

[Bill R.]

posted on it in the past. Toyota has a secret warranty on them if you bitch long enough and loud enough and have some kind of proof of regular oil changes. Toyota is covering them until 100k miles or six years if i recall correctly. One of my customers bought a camry at a toyota factory lease return auction in Virginia when he was on vacation there It had 36k miles on it and used a quart of oil every 200 miles coming back to arizona... He called me when he got back and asked what he should do.. I told him it was still under warranty (which it was ) and to take it back to the dealer here and have them fix it... It turned out that they refused to fix it and said it hadn't had regular maintenance.. He then told them that he just purchased it through a toyota factory authorized auction for lease returns and it was supposed to have had everything checked over.. He ended up having to pay half to replace the motor 2K was his share of it. And six months later when i saw that toyota had agreed to warranty all of them , I called him and let him know. He got reimbursed by toyota for the 2k.... The only thing thats known to help prevent it is synthetic motor oil.








have you looked in the bottom of one of the quart bottles after putting it in your engine? Try looking in it next time. Looks like some of the additives might be settling out. I have used Castrol since the 1970's and I noticed this a few years ago. If you shake it up before you pour it seems to mix back in the oil. The post from earlier about Toyota Camry engines sludging up makes me really want to go to Mobil1 in the wife's V6 Camry and glad I already did in the 525. Any comments? Anyone else notice this?
John R

[ryan roopnarine]

darkness in motor oil is usually molybdenum.....you might be gettin a couple of extra cents worth out of yer motor oil if its darker than other bottles :D i don't have that problem, as i am currently trying out the german castrol syntec 0w30 which looks like sludgy green antifreeze instead of motor oil (besides smelling like da windex). i hope the report on it comes out ok (i'm putting about 700 mi/week on it, should be time for an oil change in about 3 weeks).

[cary]

German castrol is supposed to smell like gummy bears, did you get the right stuff? :D :D :D

Settling does occur in oil sometimes, I wouldn't worry about it.

Cary

[Paul in NZ]

is the german castrol the softec ll01.My castrol 5 w 30 synthetic has quite a strong smell,not as bad as gear oil but close...

[ryan roopnarine]

German castrol is supposed to smell like gummy bears, did you get the right stuff? :D :D :D

Settling does occur in oil sometimes, I wouldn't worry about it.

Cary

i don't know what those froot loops are smoking, it smells more like windex to me than gummi bears, i know what gummi bears smell like and this aint it......

[ryan roopnarine]

is the german castrol the softec ll01.My castrol 5 w 30 synthetic has quite a strong smell,not as bad as gear oil but close...


it doesn't smell "bad" at all, nothing nearly as nasty as gear oil. it is sold in europe as castrol SLX.

[ryan roopnarine]

here's a pic of it in all of its green glory....

i'm so impressed with how little of this oil has been consumed over the last 4k miles or so

[DanDombrowski]

Hey Bill,

I posted this awhile ago, but I guess you were still out of town or whatnot. Have this issue (I think) with my girlfriends Camry now, the engine only has 30K miles on it (was already replaced once at 70K miles at the owners expense). Anywho, she's burning though oil pretty fast, so I switched it to Mobil 1 synthetic and now I'm praying it doesn't get any worse.

If it does, how hard is it to pull the oil pan on that car and clean the gunk out?

As far as the new oil, well, things tend to get shaken up on the drive home from the store rather than settle :)

[DanDombrowski]

So I did the switch on my GFs Camry to the Mobil 1. It really isn't THAT much more expensive that dino oil, I just buy a 5 quart bottle for $19 at walmart and I don't even use all of it. If you consider she was paying $25 an oil change at Jiffy Lube before I started doing it, its no extra money out of her pocket, just extra work for me, which means she does my laundry, which she ususally gets fed up with it being all over the floor and would have to do it anyway, so it all works out. I'll let you know if it ends up burning less in about 1500 miles

[DanDombrowski]

I'd just love for you to take your car in to a Goodyear or Jiffy lube and have them flip out and tell you that you put coolant in the oil sump :)

[cary]

Dan,

Take a cruise over to bobistheoilguy.com and do a search for toyota + sludge. There is a ton of information. Most people recommend using Autorx for a cycle or two to remove the sludge and then running Mobil 1 10w-30 (if you are in a cold climate 5w-30) for 5000 mile intervals.

BTW, most of the sludging occurs in the valvetrain. Most think it is because of a large temp drop going from the head to the block.

Cary

[ryan roopnarine]

I'd just love for you to take your car in to a Goodyear or Jiffy lube and have them flip out and tell you that you put coolant in the oil sump :)


oh, that's simple.....i tell em its a half kraut/half frog halfbreed car...a joint project between citroen and BMW....the motor oil, coolant, transmission fluid all use the same thing :D seriously, though, the second the oil picks up any dirt, it begins to look like really pale motor oil. if that camry could use a heavy oil, i'd suggest that you maybe try one of the high detergency diesel 15w40 oils along with one of the gentle cleaners like the auto rx cary mentioned. i was gonna try some delvac 1300 15w40 in the e34 as a flush before i went back to a synthetic, but i was able to get the ger. syntec for 3.99 a quart, which would be about what i'd pay for 7 quarts of 0w40 anyway.

[Bill R.]

issue. Here
(http://yotarepair.com/Sludge_Zone.html)Whats usually happening in the case of increased oil consumption like yours with low mileage is that the oil control rings on the pistons have gotten gummed up from the sludge and aren't springing out tight against the cylinder walls. Cleaning the sludge out of the crankcase won't help in this case for that but its a good idea to clean the sludge you can get too anyway and then use one on the cleaners mentioned on the yota site.
When its as sludged up as yours is I don't think the mobil one will clean it up you'll have to use a more agressive cleaner. Gm top cylinder cleaner might work since that it used to free up stuck rings. GM's procedure is to remove the sparkplugs and pour a couple of ounces in each cylinder and let it soak for a couple of hours then hand crank the motor without any plugs in it to blow the cleaner out, then spin it over with the starter to remove all the rest. Then reinstall the plugs. But you'll still have to removed the valve covers and clean up the sludge in the head and pull the pan and clean the sludge out of the oil pickup screen. Once you get it cleaned up with solvent , then I would try mobil one... For your info the valve covers are over 200 each on the camry v6, thats one of the items that toyota replaces when they do them since its too much time for the mechanics to clean them up at the hourly rate the dealers charge.










Hey Bill,

I posted this awhile ago, but I guess you were still out of town or whatnot. Have this issue (I think) with my girlfriends Camry now, the engine only has 30K miles on it (was already replaced once at 70K miles at the owners expense). Anywho, she's burning though oil pretty fast, so I switched it to Mobil 1 synthetic and now I'm praying it doesn't get any worse.

If it does, how hard is it to pull the oil pan on that car and clean the gunk out?

As far as the new oil, well, things tend to get shaken up on the drive home from the store rather than settle :)

[Sweetwater]

I've never used it and don't know if it still exists, BUT

I thought there was some stuff called Rislone ? that would clean gunk out of oil burners. It required a rapid oil change after minimal circulation...maybe 1000 miles with it in the oil.

Could it be an answer? HellifIknow....

[ryan roopnarine]

issue. Here
(http://yotarepair.com/Sludge_Zone.html)Whats usually happening in the case of increased oil consumption like yours with low mileage is that the oil control rings on the pistons have gotten gummed up from the sludge and aren't springing out tight against the cylinder walls. Cleaning the sludge out of the crankcase won't help in this case for that but its a good idea to clean the sludge you can get too anyway and then use one on the cleaners mentioned on the yota site.
When its as sludged up as yours is I don't think the mobil one will clean it up you'll have to use a more agressive cleaner. Gm top cylinder cleaner might work since that it used to free up stuck rings. GM's procedure is to remove the sparkplugs and pour a couple of ounces in each cylinder and let it soak for a couple of hours then hand crank the motor without any plugs in it to blow the cleaner out, then spin it over with the starter to remove all the rest. Then reinstall the plugs. But you'll still have to removed the valve covers and clean up the sludge in the head and pull the pan and clean the sludge out of the oil pickup screen. Once you get it cleaned up with solvent , then I would try mobil one... For your info the valve covers are over 200 each on the camry v6, thats one of the items that toyota replaces when they do them since its too much time for the mechanics to clean them up at the hourly rate the dealers charge.

haw haw haw

if you've read my travails over the last 1 1/2 months, you will have read that i've done what bill describes to the e34 (with the exception of the valve covers, of course). i was doing it for the sake of carbon removal, not to unstick the rings. when i was hanging around the saturn places that this is described in( they have stuck rings a lot, apparently) , i read that they are moving away from using the gm top engine cleaner for this procedure, and are using something called GM piston and ring cleaner. it is about double the price of the top engine cleaner, and is supposedly better at this task. i personally used berryman's b12 chemtool, but i didn't know of the existence of the aforementioned product. restarting the car was a primo BIA-TCH. it took at least 10 mins of effort on my part, cranking the crap out, putting plugs back in after drying, thinking that i'd have to call a towtruck and take the car somewhere, before it would start up again (i bet the starter's life was knocked down a couple of notches afterward). an aircompressor might make the engine easier to start up afterward by removing as much crap from the cyl. as possible. you definitely run the risk of killing a spark plug by fouling after doing this.

[632 Regal]

haw haw haw

if you've read my travails over the last 1 1/2 months, you will have read that i've done what bill describes to the e34 (with the exception of the valve covers, of course). i was doing it for the sake of carbon removal, not to unstick the rings. when i was hanging around the saturn places that this is described in( they have stuck rings a lot, apparently) , i read that they are moving away from using the gm top engine cleaner for this procedure, and are using something called GM piston and ring cleaner. it is about double the price of the top engine cleaner, and is supposedly better at this task. i personally used berryman's b12 chemtool, but i didn't know of the existence of the aforementioned product. restarting the car was a primo BIA-TCH. it took at least 10 mins of effort on my part, cranking the crap out, putting plugs back in after drying, thinking that i'd have to call a towtruck and take the car somewhere, before it would start up again (i bet the starter's life was knocked down a couple of notches afterward). an aircompressor might make the engine easier to start up afterward by removing as much crap from the cyl. as possible. you definitely run the risk of killing a spark plug by fouling after doing this.

[ryan roopnarine]

its gone down quite a bit after doing that, but i only let it soak 30 mins, which might explain why it didn't do more.

[DanDombrowski]

GAH! That sounds like something I want to avoid.

I actually found that yotarepair site and read his sludge article, but I don't remember it saying anything about the rings or why it was consuming oil. For now, I'm going to pray that it doesn't get worse, but I might PM you in a month or two and ask some specifics on this procedure. With any luck, this should be covered under Toyotas secret warranty, right? RIGHT?

:)

[ryan roopnarine]

if the sludge is as bad as the pictures on that site suggest, the PITA of doing the ring cleaning procedure is small beans if it keeps the oil from coming up into your head past your rings. i think if i had means of getting more of the backwash fluid out of the spark plug holes (like with an air compressor), it would have started up quicker. i don't think that pulling the oilpan will be nearly as easy as that to do....i will likely do it again at christmas until the combustion area is cleaned to my satisfaction, but with an aircompressor ....AND more importantly, with a longer soak time. the soak might even be the reason why my syn. oil consumption is down SOOO much, never even considered that.

[Bill R.]

off the combustion chamber and valves, only off the top of the pistons, which you should be able to see with a bright light and the spark plugs out.
A bore scope won't be needed for yours. You might be better off to buy some of the better quality combustion chamber deposit and valve deposit cleaners out there and use them in the gas. Your deposits may be on the edge of a valve or on the combustion chamber surface itself... And bits of carbon like that , that can heat up and glow will cause preignition or ping, or a sharp edge anywhere in the chamber or on the spark plug itself can cause pinging.. If the sparkplugs are poorly made and have a sharp edge on the outer electrode or a thread that screws too far into the combustion chamber which will heat up and glow then ping will take place, etc etc








if the sludge is as bad as the pictures on that site suggest, the PITA of doing the ring cleaning procedure is small beans if it keeps the oil from coming up into your head past your rings. i think if i had means of getting more of the backwash fluid out of the spark plug holes (like with an air compressor), it would have started up quicker. i don't think that pulling the oilpan will be nearly as easy as that to do....i will likely do it again at christmas until the combustion area is cleaned to my satisfaction, but with an aircompressor ....AND more importantly, with a longer soak time. the soak might even be the reason why my syn. oil consumption is down SOOO much, never even considered that.