Do you have any evidence (lab test?) to prove that you are smarter than Mercedes engineers?

 

Dear K, no at all, and I clearly stated it is my personal opinión. However, I am Mechanical Engineer by training (@10 years of schooling plus years of experience teaching at the college level, and worked in the transportation industry a few decades ago) and I help, when asked, colleagues in the automotive industry. I may not know thing sometimes, and I will do as much research as possible to form MY opinion.

You have your opinions, and I respect them regardless if I agree with them or not.

 

I base my opinions on test, you do yours on religious (?) believes.
It has nothing to do with Mechanical degree, especially when oil formulation require degree in chemistry.

 

 

There are ZERO benefits and MANY drawbacks to randomly using thicker oil than specified by the tribologists that know exactly what size the various passages inside the engine are, what materials various parts are made of and how much oil they need for lubrication and cooling, and then designed the proper tests if not the oil itself for said engine to make sure it best meets that specific engine requirements.

Viscosity choices have to do with ENGINE CLEARANCES. Unless you take the engine apart completely, machine it and rebuild it to a tighter tolerance than original specs, then running the oil recommended in the manual is still your best bet. If anything, for daily commuting in a normal passenger car I'd run thinner oil in a motor, never thicker than what it calls for. Thinner oil flows better, provides more lubrication and more importantly, more cooling to various internal engine hot spots. Thicker oil doesn't flow as fast, and, in some cases, it may not be able to flow through tiny oil passages at all. Unless you're driving a race engine where the thinner oil doesn't have enough film strength and you're shearing the oil, use what the engineers that designed the engine recommended.

 

who is running thicker oil than recommended by the manufacturer?

as far as the MB operating manual we can run these engines up 10W40 without breaking any guidelines.

Where does it say to run these engines with 0W40 ONLY?


It seems some people can choose but others cannot?

 

It was in response to "2 - increase oil weight to 5W40, and if weather permits even 10W40 (not during Ontario winter)", so something you wrote. I have no idea what the permitted oil viscosity ranges are for that engine, but unless you're in Kuwait and towing a trailer full of camels to the market every day in scorching heat for two hours, increasing the oil weight in our climates is not just unnecessary but possibly even detrimental.

 

I follow what the manufacturer recommendations are in terms of viscosity of the oil etc as they have a better understanding of the product. In terms of how often one has to change oil and filter there is a diverse set of opinions by desktop automotive mechanics lol. I have watched individuals on YouTube who have gone to great lengths to document oil analysis over a substantial period of time and kudos to them.

My personal experience on a ford explorer V8 4.3 that I owned for ten years - I used to change oil every 8K KM and kept up with all the other services. The motor was good but at 550k km I got rid of the truck because the body was disintegrating. This is one of the problems for us who live in the snow belts. According to some of the papers I have read the GLE panels are galvanized both sides to combat the rust problem.

 

@ZX81 - love the nickname. It was the first Sinclair I had. Welcome to the board.

 

the permitted viscosities are listed in the post, and the temperature range as well. Do you stil think that 5W40 is for Kuwait climate? Even 10W40 is good in the southern US during the summer.

On separate note, my source is from an automotive component manufacturer that test these engines, and other engine manufacturer, 24/7/365 to certify their products. It is not pulled from thin air. They collect more data that can be collected in this forum if we were to send our oil for testing, and they measure wear, something we cannot unless we disassemble our engines between oil changes.

I once again repeat that is my personal decision and recommendation if asked. I am not preaching it for everyone

 

@Diabolis Thank you. It is amazing you picked up on that lol. While schooling in the UK I saved hard to be able to buy the ZX81 and ultimately it led me to the path of software engineering. My inclinations were always towards electronics and real time development. I got a PDF copy of the service manual for the GLE and I was skimming through and noted that there are a plethora of micro controllers present in the GLE.

 

@ZX81 , I guess you know, being a technology manager, that manufacturer guidelines are not absolutes, but compromises with ranges, or "confidence margins"

I used to live in Waterloo until 2015. Hope Ontario weather is treating you well.

 

My point is that if, say, a 5W-40 and a 10W-40 are both permitted and are otherwise similar, I will take the 5W-40 over the 10W-40 for normal operating conditions. Every time. The only possible advantage that an old, non-synthetic dinosaur juice derived 10W-40 oil may have over a 5W-40 oil is that it could contain less viscosity modifiers, but that is no longer the case with synthetic oils and moreover not even a distant secondary concern when you compare the engine wear caused by the reduced flow rate of the 10W- vs. the 5W- oil when the engine is cold. As for my sources, it is from doing statistical failure analyses for Mercedes... as in I was the guy that analyzed the data that they collected from various failures and reported on it. I also partially own an independent shop where we mostly work on race cars and build engines, I've been racing cars for about 25 years now in various series, and so I am generally involved in the automotive industry despite the fact that I don't work in it.

I was 12 and lived in Europe when the ZX81 came out. It also very significantly shaped my life and the the path I ended up taking (electrical engineering and design). I'm a consultant now and also dabble in my other passion, namely cars.

As for Mercedes and microcontrollers, some six or seven years ago I was doing a gig for them in trying to figure out why they were seeing unusually high failure rates with some control modules. We eventually isolated it to specific module batches, which in turn contained microcontroller chips from specific batches. Those batches were in turn made on specific days at a particular NXP chip manufacturing plant. At that point, NXP started to dig deeper and determined that the only correlation was one employee that worked on those days in the class 4 clean room where the chip wafers were being prepared for the chemical vapour deposition process. Apparently she used some kind of personal care product that had a specific smell / perfume in it that bound to the wafers and caused the PN junctions that were subsequently formed on the chip dies to prematurely fail. That's my Mercedes microcontroller story.

Sorry for the diversion / thread hijack everyone.

 

we are getting somewhere. I already moved from 0W40, and the engine runs definitely better, and from the Indy the last two oil services looked better ( filter, light through ).
do not get that nasty burnt oil smell either after the hard run. Not racing by any means.
10W40 is on the list to evaluate because the technical recommendation, and also know some people already are using it in similar climate, and some even colder than Florida.

Enjoy

 

@juanmor40 winter has not been too bad this year at least as of today. I guess given the extreme temperatures we are operating in it does make sense to use 0W oil. As for tolerances yes there are upper and lower limits to every thing mechanical or electrical. However, there is an optimal value that is usually recommended by the designer of the product.

@Diabolis that is a fascinating story on the PN junction. On a separate note any recommendation for a reliable Mercedes service place in GTA ?