Ford Truck

In my travels, I ran into a man selling a truck who was the original owner. One of his selling points was that it had ALWAYS had synthetic oil in the crankcase. He was an investigator with our state dept of securities. Before that he was with the dept of consumer protection and he told me about a case he worked on where a company was selling used engines and misrepresenting the miles on them. In the course of their investigation they employed some engine rebuilding experts who claimed they could tell how many miles an engine had on it (within a few thousand) just by measuring the wear in a few key places. The one exception to that was an engine using synthetic oil. It does not wear as quickly. Anyway that was his story. I didn't buy his truck (not the "right" one), but I'm halfway convinced to start using synthetic oil.

If I stumbled on to a 10,000 mile 6 year old truck, that's what I'd probably use. Now I gotta figure out which is the best synthetic oil for the buck.

I use Mobil 1 in every engine I own. Synthetic oil is cheap compared to rebuilds.

A while back Consumer Reports studied synthetic oils vs regular oil in N.Y. taxi fleets for 150,000 service miles. Both performed equal. The key is regular changes, has always worked for me. That removes combustion contamination in the oil. I'd rather change it, than trust it will be ok to have containation flowing in a synthetic with extended change intervals.