Λιπαντικα. Τι πρεπει να γνωριζουμε

[Z4 DCT]

CASE STUDY: MOROSO ACCUMULATER (PISTONLESS UPRIGHT BOTTLE TYPE) PRE-OILER ON V8 ZEPHYRS
zephyr
A reader contacted me about using pre-oilers on classic vehicles. Here's what he had to say:
"I use the MOROSO Accumulater 2 which is a pistonless upright bottle type. I researched these after experiencing oil pressure drops of 20psi on uphill right hand corners at speed. The Moroso 2 cured it right away. I plumbed it directly into where the oil sender went and used a tee for the oil light sender. I have a ½" ball valve at the bottle I use but intend to rig a choke cable to use it from inside the car. Electric solenoid valves are available too. To do an oil change the factory fitted tire valve is pumped with 20psi of air and the tap opened, old oil is then fully pushed out into the sump via the oil feeds. The car if used for racing etc is driven with the ball valve open, any drop in oil pressure is taken over by the accumulater until the oil pump pick up is covered again. I also use the oiler to lube the engine (Ford V8) by turning the valve with the engine off, the oil pressure goes up to about 20-30psi (you can hear it gurgle in the rocker covers!). After 10-15 seconds I then start the engine. You turn the valve off with the engine running to trap oil for the next start up.Racers run these on engines that can be "claimed" after a race as if the engine had a high doller sump pan they would lose it with the engine. The Accumulater works better than any trap door or baffled sump if you spin backwards off a track too!"
There are further writeups of this particular installation available at StockCarRacing.com.

Picture credit: MkIII Zephyr V8s
OIL FILTERS AND FILTRATION.
Thanks to one reader who noted that in all of this page, until mid-2001 I had not given much, if any space, to the topic of filters and filtration. So here we go.
It's all very well changing your oil often, but it's not just the oil that helps prevent engine wear. The oil filter does its part too. Dirt is the prime cause of engine wear. Not big dirt, like you'd see in a yard, but minute particles of dirt. It's dirt nevertheless, and it's abrasive. These contaminants vary from road dust (which are razor-like flakes from an engine's perspective) that doesn't get filtered out by the air filter, up to actual metal particles - the byproducts of the casting scarf from the original engine manufacture, and basic engine wear. All this nastiness is carried around by the oil into the minute parts of your engine, being rammed into the precision clearances between bearings and other moving parts. Once in, they don't come out easy, but tend to stay there, wearing grooves, grinding and generally messing up your engine. Other debris that causes problems are a by-product of the mere way an engine works - sooty particles from the combustion process can be forced past the piston rings and transported around in the oil too. This is definitely A Bad Thing - the soot acts like a sponge and soaks up other oil additives reducing the oil's anti-wear properties, and messing up it's viscosity. All this dirt is why oil goes black when it's used. That lovely syrup-like yellow that it is when you put it in is pure oil. The black stuff that comes out at an oil change is the same oil full of contaminants and by-products from wear and tear.
Spin-on oil filter
That's where the oil filter comes in. It's job is to catch all this crap floating around in the oil, and to stop it from recircuutf8g. Most oil filters that you or I will ever see are the spin-on type. They're shaped like an aluminium can and spin on to a threaded oil feeder poking out of the side of the engine somewhere. They're called 'full-flow' oil filters because they sit in the normal flow of the oil through the engine. Sort of like an electrical component in series with all the other electrical component. Because it sits in-line, it has to be designed not to restrict the flow of oil around the circuit, and thus can only really be effective at stopping the larger particles. Large, in this case, is around the 20micron size. So here's the catch. The smallest contaminants are in the 10-20micron size range. Not only is that "extremely small", but it means that they pass right through the oil filter and back out into circulation. This is why regular oil changes are a necessity, because these tiny little things can be the most damaging.
There is another alternative, but it's only really used in heavy applications or for racing. That alternative is to fit a secondary bypass oil filter. This is sort of like a filter in parallel with the primary one. It doesn't restrict the flow of oil in the main circuit, but the oil that passes through it is filtered down to the 5 micron range, thus removing even the smallest contaminants. The newest filters claim to work down to 1 micron, though I can't confirm nor deny those claims. The upside is that by cleaning the oil so completely, bypass oil filters increase not only engine life, but also the life of the oil itself. This means longer service intervals.
MAGNETISED OIL TRAPS
A beartrap-type filter magnet attached to a spin-on oil filter beartrap
Recently, magnetic filter additions have started to surface. I was sent one in 2001 to try out and it really did seem to work. The product in question was called the Bear Trap BT500. Their website can be found here (now owned by One Eye Industries). It's basically a sleeve made of foam rubber and plastic with some magnets in it. It bends to clamp around the outside of your regular spin-on oil filter. The idea is that the magnets will attract any metal debris in your oil and stick them to the inside of the oil filter wall, thus preventing them from going back into the oil circulation. Being of a curious nature (or stupid, depending on how you look at it) I decided to dismantle my oil filter after using the Bear Trap for 5000 miles. I learned a couple of things.
You shouldn't try to do this yourself.
It's bloody messy.
But most importantly, after a brief period in accident and emergency to stitch up the gash in my hand, I discovered that sure enough, there were tiny arrangements of metal filings clustered around the inside of the oil filter wall where the magnets from the beartrap had been. You'll excuse the lack of photos to prove the point, but I had other things to worry about. If you visit their website or that of FilterMag (below) you'll see similar cutaway photos.
So can I recommend their product? Yes.
filtermag
Another alternative to the Bear Trap is the FilterMag - essentially the same style of product but from a different manufacturer.

AN ALTERNATIVE TO CUSTOM MAGNETISED OIL TRAPS.
Thanks to John Nightingale who read my pages and then felt he should contribute something. For those of you who do more than just change your filter - ie. take off the oil pan completely, John writes:
" Next time you are in the mall or high street, drop into the Radio Shack or a hardware store and purchase a package of modern, powerful ceramic magnets. These are available in various shapes and they are cheap. Radio Shack sells a package of two wafer shaped magnets, for instance. Stroll out to your car at the end of your shopping trip, bend down and stick these magnets onto convenient flat surfaces the bottom of your oil pan either side of the drain hole or as convenient. Now the magnets will magnetize the steel of the oil pan in their area. On the inside, particles coming through the field established by a magnet will be sequestered by being stuck to the bottom of the oil pan. Next time you take off the oil pan, clean it out in the usual way, pull off the magnets from the outside, clean them up and then stick them onto the inside of the oil pan at the bottom but clear of the drain hole. This will give an even better result since now the oil is exposed to the naked magnets themselves. The bottom of the oil pan in the area of each of the magnets is also magnetized, of course, and contributing to the effect. Resist the temptation to stand the magnets on edge to expose more of their surface to the oil. Placing the magnets flat on the oil pan uses the oil pan's steel as a keeper for the magnets and will ensure that they stay powerful. Placing the magnets flat will increase the area of the oil pan that is part of the magnetic circuit so you will loose no particle pick up area by having the magnets lying flat. "
MAGNETISED OIL TRAPS - DOING IT YOURSELF.
There's nothing really special about magnetised oil traps other than the type of magnet they use. Bear Trap and FilterMag basically offer a consumer-oriented product. But if you're a tinkerer, there's nothing to stop you doing it yourself. The magnets normally used are Neodymium, nearly the most powerful nonelectric magnet type. They are the kind of magnet used in computer hard drives, often coming in pairs held just a few millimeters apart with the back end of the hard drive head assembly (the part being made of coiled wire) in between. If you can find a couple of old hard drives - try the local computer junk store - you ought to be able to disassemble them and take the magnets out to stick to your own oil filter. John Nicholas Sarris, a reader of my site, suggested this and provided the following photos as an example.
DIY filter magnet DIY filter magnet DIY filter magnet DIY filter magnet
DIY filter magnet
THE IMPORTANCE OF NEODYMIUM MAGNETS
I thought it worth pointing out here what a potential disaster awaits the home tinkerer if you just grab any old magnet and stick it on the outside of your oil filter. Your common or garden ferrous magnet, like those horrible souvenir magnets stuck to your fridge (you know you've got some) are usually made from iron, and thus have a limited life span which in some cases can be as short as 6 or 12 months. During this time they progressively lose thier power. Not enough for that hideous magnetic photo frame to drop off the fridge, but enough to be a problem if it was stuck to your oil filter. Why's that then? Well, come the end of the filters life, just as the magnet is weakening and the collection of metal particles is at it's highest, one good jolt and it could dislodge, and a large collection of metal shavings and filings could detach from the inside of the filter and find its way back into your engine all in one go. That would be bad. So as much as you might like the magnetic photo of granny and the giraffe from Whipsnade zoo to be stuck in a filthy oily place on your car, don't do it.
LARGER FILTERS ON STANDARD CARS?
There's a school of thought which says that enlarging the oil filter on your car is A Good Thing. Why is this?
The small oil filters fitted to engines these days tend to have their bypass valves set to open at quite low pressures (8-11psi or so). This valve is a safety device designed to bypass the oil filter element (the actual paper or fabric filter inside the canister) in the event of a high pressure differential - typically from poor maintenance - ie. a blocked filter element. Once the pressure differential between the two sides of the filter element is too large, the bypass valve pops open and the unfiltered oil bypasses the filter element completely and just runs back out into the engine.
But the bypass valve can open under other circumstances too. For example, thick, cold oil doesn't pass through the filter element very well, resulting in a high pressure differential, meaning the bypass valve opens.
The same can happen in warm engine if you have a lead foot. A quick acceleration away from the traffic lights can result in the oil pressure in the engine increasing quickly - quicker than the filter element can handle - and for a few moments while the pressure equalises inside the filter, the bypass valve will again be open.
So how does this pertain to larger filters? Larger filters have bigger filter elements, which means they tend to have higher pressure bypass valves (around 14-18psi) meaning there needs to be a much bigger pressure differential before the oil will bypass the filter. Better for cold starts, short commutes and those with a love of acceleration.
There are some things you need to be aware of if you're going to try this approach, all of which are relevant, and none of which I can confirm or deny:
Bigger filter = more "dead" space = more oil. Remember you'd need to add more oil to the engine to keep the oil level at the correct mark on the dipstick. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - more oil doing the same job theoretically means less stress on the oil.
Oil may take a little longer to circulate around the engine after startup, as the pump may have to fill up the larger capacity oil filter. Note that the oil filter backflow preventer (anti-drainback valve) doesn't help here because it does eventually allow the oil to drain out of the filter with the engine switched off. Anti-drainback refers to the function of keeping the unfiltered oil from draining back into the engine - it eventually passes through the filter and drains out the normal way.
Availability of filters and fouling. If you put a larger filter on it might foul something else in the engine bay. That is if you can find a larger filter to start with. The rule of is to go to a motor factors shop, and find the oil filter that was designed for your engine. Then look through the myriad of larger oil filter boxes for a bigger filter that has the same screw thread and sealing ring diameter. Nowadays most spin-on filters have a 20mm screw thread so that's not going to be the hard part. Finding the same sealing ring diameter is the thing to be careful of. And don't ask the people at the parts counter. Because of liability issues, they're unlikely to sell you anything other than exact filter for your make and model of vehicle.
Like the site? The page you're reading is free, but if you like what you see and feel you've learned something, a small donation to help pay down my car loan would be appreciated. Thank you.

A PRACTICAL EXAMPLE OF THE PROPER PROCEDURES SAVING AN ENGINE.
I started these pages back in 1994 and have been adding to them ever since. I've always followed my own advice and in 2005, it paid off big time. I'll tell this in the past tense because it'll get lost in the page and I'll forget to update it when I change motorbikes.
So I owned a 2001 BMW R1150GS motorbike. I bought it pre-owned from my local dealer who assured me it had been through the workshops as part of the "standard procedure" of them taking a bike in and re-selling it. For 2 years I'd been riding it with horrible engine noise and engine detonation (pre-ignition). Every time I took it back to the dealer, they were adamant there was nothing wrong with the engine, and that "they all do that". Not believing them, I finally found an independent BMW specialist who took the engine apart for me. It turned out the BMW dealership had lied - the bike had never been in their service department. This was evidenced by the fact that the cylinders had sand in them. The dealership had never bothered to check the bike and wouldn't believe my complaints about the noisy engine. The independent mechanic fixed it all up for me - an $1100 repair bill that involved basically stripping down the entire engine, honing the cylinder barrels, putting in new piston rings, cleaning the pistons, barrels, heads, throttle and airbox, flushing and cleaning the whole thing and putting it all back together. The point is that during the two years I'd been riding it with sand in the engine, I'd been religiously topping up the oil and changing the filter. It's a testament to BMW engineering that the engine ran without seizing up, but it's also a testament to paying attention to your oil changes. If I'd let it slide, or not done the filter, that engine would not have been a rebuild - it would have been a far more costly brand new engine.
THIS IS ALL GREAT. NOW HOW DO I ACTUALLY CHANGE MY OIL?
A good number of readers will get to this point in the page and think "this is easy - I could do this!", and for the most part, you can. In my DIY articles, you can find a page on how to change your engine oil. Enjoy.