Engine oil suggestions?

Mobil 1 FTW. Been using it on my 98 Camry for over 3+ years and the car is still running smooth.

 

How good is pennzoil ultra????

 

I only use oil with black caps on the bottle, this has worked well for me.

 

Pennzoil is good stuff no matter which Pennzoil you buy.

 

You're right. Pennzoil has always been a very good oil. Back in the 70's you did have to change it more often because of the paraffin but they re-formulated it decades ago and it is now one of the best out there. It wasn't a bad oil back in the 70's either. As a matter of fact it was a very good oil. But it needed to be changed every 2000 miles or less. But then, in those days many people were changing their oil at less than 3000 mile intervals. I did mine every 2000 back then.

I never knew anyone back then that went past 3000 although I did hear about those who did. I heard a story from a mechanic I worked with back then where a guy with a Caddillac went 100,000 miles without an oil change. He brought it into the dealer the mechanic was working at and told them it was running rough. They dropped the pan to find inches, many inches, of sludge the crankshaft had even carved it's way through. They cleaned it out and ran it with automatic transmission fluid for 5 minutes, drained it and filled it back up with new oil and a filter. The owner came in and said, "Well, it's good for another 100,000" and drove off into the sunset.

Even the oil guru's over at BITOG that take the oil discussion to the extreme love Pennzoil. Quaker state was another one that had issues decades ago. It was incompatible with most other oils resulting in the sludge monster if you added anything else to it. Not the case any more.

 

Oh yeah, Quaker St. was considered about a notch above Ring Seal.

I'ts true oils used to have local characteristics. Havoline was W. TX. Int. based, Penn was from Penn. fields, now they're all blended from Saudi Arabia stock and use pretty uniform additive/ formulation.
Funny how our oil gets refined and sold overseas and we import M.E./Venz. oil to use here. Really depends on how the refinery is set up to use sweet/ sour stock.

ALL the Canadian oil is for export once refined. (they make it into diesel mostly) It's pretty dirty. You could say it's bitumen based vs. Paraffin OR Sulfur.
There's a reason they wanted it to go straight to a major port.

 

There was never anything concrete as to whether or not pennzoil and the "paraffin" in it had anything to do with sludge. The era you mention was discussed to have also been a time with PCV systems were a new thing and were terrible. So that could have been the reason. And since Pennzoil was and is the most popular brand of oil, people pointed the finger at the oil instead of bad engineering.

A quote taken from https://www.bobistheoilguy.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1217824
"A paraffin is just a common name for a saturated C-H chain (hydrocarbon chain). In chemistry they are known as an alkane. The term paraffinic base oil is derived from the term paraffin, meaning a saturated hydrocarbon based oil.

Almost all motor oils contain, or, are mostly paraffin's (alkanes), including Group I, II, III, IV and many oils in Group V. The exception in motor oils are the ones based on esters (Group V) and other oils which are not paraffins in Group V, but a motor oil using only ester base oils is rare.

Paraffin is sometimes confused with paraffin wax. A paraffin isn’t necessarily a wax. There are paraffin type compounds and then there are paraffin waxes. The shorter paraffins (alkanes) like methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6) are gaseous at room temperature. As the hydrocarbon chain gets longer ~ 10C, the C-H chained molecules become liquid at room temperature (oils), and when you have a long straight chain with ~20C atoms or more, the molecules will form a crystalline structure at room temperature known as a wax.

PAO's are made from alkenes, which are not paraffins (alkane's). Alkenes = olefin = C-H molecule with at least one double C=C bond. Modern PAO's are hydrogenated to remove any remaining C=C double bonds (saturate the carbon atoms with hydrogen) to increase their thermal/oxidative stability, which in effect turns the chained alkenes in the PAO into alkanes, which are paraffin's. So, hydrogenated PAO's (Group IV) are paraffin's too."

 

Mobil 1 and Wix or Toyota oil filters

Having said that, I agree with what many have mentioned above. Any oil that meets spec and is on sale will work fine. But for $10 or so more $'s, I prefer Mobil 1.

 

"The era you mention was discussed to have also been a time with PCV systems were a new thing and were terrible."

Not just PCV's. Some states were also forcing people to add on contraptions to their engines to "save the planet". Such as the "NOX System" which retarded the timing so you couldn't get your engine to run right. The 70's was when they started in with all the smog pumps and just added more from that point on. None of the smog stuff really worked back then, at least not for long, and it was proven that after 50,000 miles the engines weren't any cleaner than some car from the 60's without anything on it. The engines weren't designed for all the "add-ons" and power was cut. It took some time to engineer all the various emissions systems to work together with the engine.

 

"Oh yeah, Quaker St. was considered about a notch above Ring Seal."

Let's not forget the Arco Graphite. We can't leave that one out. Many an engine fell pray to that crap.

 

Nah, I'm talking about the early days. Like early '00s and I don't mean this century. 'Sweet Crude' from Pennsylvania had much more paraffin than Texas Intermediate which was considered on the 'sour' side. BOTH had enough that the old units actually went straight to a cold dewaxer before a first boil. Most modernized refineries (built after the '40s) don't involve this step as Cat Cracking (flash boil)came into vogue. Also, we started more and more Saudi oil and S.American oil and it's so sulfurous (very sour and cheaper) that the 'real' paraffin isn't a problem. So this 'myth' about Pennzoil is very, very old and was true in the beginning.
Gulfwax was a byproduct of refining and I believe they bought from Texaco which was across the street. I started working at both in the '80s and the 'waxers' were pretty much non used.....maybe for a specialty oil like 4-in-1 or WD-40 that was 'out of stream'.

Yes on the emissions controls, hell we're still ironing out the kinks. '70a were terrible but I have a '98 Sienna that sludges @3000 and 1 mile.
Toyota payed for many a Camry engine at that time frame. The valve cover baffles were screwy.

 

"Yes on the emissions controls, hell we're still ironing out the kinks."

I think they have gas engines where they need to be as far as emissions. They could even roll back the emissions requirements quite a bit on gas engines along with CAFE standards. The problems they have with various gas engines are simply CAFE related. My guess is that any gas engine that has any problems at all in this day and age has to do with CAFE standards. In other words, trying to run a gas engine with no gas. Gas engines actually put out nothing but inert gases and even at "nothing" standards they are past where they need to be. When an engineer has to "grasp at straws" to design a government engine they are going to screw something up once in a while.

As far as oil? You obviously know more about it than I do.