Cheap Maintenance Tricks

A comment by Jensenman in the "Let's Bash the Japanese...No, let's bash the domestics..." thread made me remember this.

A neighbor of mine growing up had been an aircraft engineer during WWII, mainly the big bombers. Had a Lebaron coupe for years, and once in a while, I'd see him in his driveway with a coffee filter setup and his oil. Turns out, that he would drain the oil in the car at a specified time interval (he had a meter added to the car), filter it, change the filter on the car and add oil to top it off. Did this for over 160,000 km (he passed away with 16x,xxx on the odo). Car always ran well. He figured that if it was good enough for the bombers, that had to stay in the air, it was good enough for his car. Haven't heard about the car in many years, his son took it to Toronto and drove it downtown for at least a couple of years though.

See, I can love the domestics too.

I have heard of this with big diesel trucks, it seems that every so often you drain and filter the oil, replace the oil filter, put the old oil back in and add fresh oil to level. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. It just seems non cost effective to risk losing a megadollar engine by cutting corners on oil.

My grandfather said they used to put used motor oil in 55 gal drums and let it sit (covered). After some time, the contaminants would settle to the bottom and they would skim the "good" oil off the top and re-use it. This would have been in the mid 30's to early 40's on a farm. He said he saw them doing it in motor pools WWII era too.

My theory is the oil had little to no additives back then and oil would go "bad" only by getting dirty. Remove the dirt and the oil is good again (would think the lead and zinc additives are hardy). Now a days, we have fancy additives that break down and no sturdy toxic additives. Plus they would re-babbit the bearings often and get new rings every 100k. But thats just a theory.

And those 2.2/2.5 mopar engines in non turbo form are tough.

I've done it on a beater before. In 95 I bought a rusty 85 Cherokee with 90k miles on it. I just used it as a winter get-to-work vehicle.

It burned about a quart of oil every 1500-2000 miles or so. I just changed the filter every 3000 miles and topped it off as needed. Sold it at 130k running fine with good oil pressure.

daytonaer wrote: And those 2.2/2.5 mopar engines in non turbo form are tough.

maybe I ended up with the one bad apple, the 2.5 in the acclaim I learned to drive in never had a head gasket last past 25k, and around 120k the entire engine blew up, and all with proper maintanance. Then my parents gave it to my sister and she had the engine replaced, the new engine would snap cams every 6 months.

Back on topic, old oil didnt have "detergents" that actually revome the crap from the engine. The stuff that turns modern oil "dark" when you drain it would still be in the engine with "non-detergent" oil. Or so I learned back in Auto Tech.