Reply to "Oil discussion"

I talked with someone (I forget the name of the outfit, but it was a for-panteras comapny. He said he'd rebuilt probably 300 ZF boxes, and recomended Penzoil 80-90 part #4963 so that's what I plan to get for the gearbox.

For the engine, this particular gentleman recommended Joe Gibbs non-synthetic oil, saying many of the top engine builders he knew ran and recommended this oil.

I know when I ran my Porsche (where oil and brands are a BIG deal) the 2 brands thrown around mostly were "Brad Penn" (renamed Kendall-the green stuff) or "Swepco" which is what I ran.

I spent many hours researching oils. Kendall, or now "Brad Penn" oil is supposed to come from this one very special oil well that pumps out THE sweetest oil ever, which I found interesting.

Swepco oil, which is what the previous owner of my Porsche recommended, is what I ran, and I can definitely say Swepco is REALLY good! It's not synthetic, but both Brad Penn and Swepco both contain higher/est levels of zinc and ZDDP.

Today's overhead cam engines do not need the same addatives because they run at lower pressures and stresses than our older, flat tappet, "old style" engines that had really high spring pressures, and flat tappets, and the zinc and ZDDP caused havoc with the catalytic converters, so, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago (wild guess) they made a reformulation across the board for all motor oils. I don't know the whole story, but I DO know that if you run something like Castrol GTX in your old Porsche flat-6, you'll flatten your cams out within 10-20 thousand miles, and so oils with more of the "old style formulations" were what one needed to run in their older porsches.

Now on American angines, I've seen it all. I've seen engines that never had their oil changed EVER, and run for 100k miles, I've seen engines so sludged up I was surprised they even ran, and then I've seen engines that were sparkling clean and looked better than the day they were built with high miles, so I really don't know.

When I ran motocycles, I know switching to synthetic ALWAYS caused leaks to appear from nowhere, the stuff just likes to seep and leak if it can.

On my new (to me) hotrod engine, I'm probably going to go with that Joe Gibbs oil or Brad Penn or Swepco, one of those three, not sure yet.

All these oils are not cheap, my car has a 10 quart oil pan, fun stuff.