Kentetsu

I have worn oil control rings, which leads to extreme smoking when decelerating at high rpms. Even though the engine has well over 200k on it, it works great other than that smoking issue so I am not ready for a rebuild yet. I add a quart of Lucas with every oil change, and it has cured about 95% of the smoking issue. It also assists with lubrication in areas that don't always get good coverage.

How many people out there regularly race Autocross with 209,000 miles on an untouched motor without having to worry about walking home afterwards? I have some experience with this issue, and with the Lucas, and I wouldn't recommend it if it had not worked for me (and many others)...

Nismo Convert86

iTrader: (7)

WTF? I guess the lucas oil stabilizer I used for the assembly lube in my engine is going to make it fail huh?

NOCTRNL27

I've Already Bought The Motor Honey, Is That Ok To Use???

Kentetsu

Return it and get Lucas instead...

84stock

iTrader: (5)

I like semi-sythetic for the winter. Gives best of both worlds at a decent price.

trochoid

iTrader: (6)

See, I told you blondes don't listen to me. You should be running a winter weight oil in NJ, 10W30. lol Be very careful tightening the oil pan bolts. It's easy to split the cork gasket and snap off bolts.

NOCTRNL27

Ok, This Is What I'm Going To Do....i'll Try Each & Everyone Of Your Ideas And Get Back To You After A Few Tries & Tell You Which Works Best.....lmao!!!! If I Was Really A True Blond I Might Just Try That!!! I'm Just Going To Do The Oil Change And Use The 20w 50 Oil (non Synth) I Already Bought, Check & Correct The Obvious Leaks & See How It Goes. If It Doesnt Improve Then I'll Try A Stabilizer. With All The Different Opinions No Wonder You Call It The Dark Side.... I Guess It Will Just Have To Be Trial & Error And Then I Can Give My Opinion.

Thanks For All The Advice!11

DublyDurty

NOCTRNL27,

You started a dino vs synthetic war. Shame on you.

You allowed a friend to do a synthetic oil change and now it's smoking beyond belief.

Kentetsu said: What probably happened is, they looked up the required volume and got the wrong info, then overfilled the system.

You said: For the most part the thick smoke does go away after driving it a while. I drove it today and it wasn't nearly as bad as yesterday when I started it up. A few times I got on it when the light turned green and some smoke came out but no where near yesterday & the other days when we start it or drive it for a short period of time.

You said: We now have a leak on the floor of the garage. When we checked the oil yesterday it barely read on the dipstick.

Now, since you have a serious oil leak, the oil level has dropped so maybe no more (or at least greatly reduced) smoke from a possible overfill.

You said: When I went to see the car there was no smoke whatsoever. & I went to see it & I didn't notice any smoke or obvious oil leaks except for a minor leak near the filter and he said the oil pan gasket needed to be replaced which he included in the sale. I had a friend tow it to his shop to hide it from my hubby. While it was there he changed the pan gasket & did a synthetic oil change on it.

Your friend did the oil change and replaced the oil pan gasket. Since he removed the oil drain plug you now have (at least) two sources for leaks (drain plug/crush ring and gasket).

You said: We don't use it everyday so whenever he starts it up, it smokes so bad you can't see the car in the driveway.

I think most people will tell you that if the car sits for “days” it will smoke more on initial startup, and decrease as you drive and/or get regular use.

Change back to dino oil, 10W30 (0degF to 85degF) for winter temps in your area (as trochoid said) and get the right filter (I use a K&N HP-1004 on my ’83 but that may be overkill. Lucas and Seafoam is up to you after you’ve done your own research. I’ve never needed to use either.

You said: This engine was very clean when I got it. (So props to the previous owner for good maintenance or maybe he/she had it cleaned before selling it. At least that should make locating the leak(s) a lot easier).

And a couple of people mentioned “o-rings”. You’ll confirm or eliminate that upon inspection.

You said: Is it ok to use Motor honey? (Again, I’ve never used it, but still wouldn’t recommend it.)

You said: If I Was Really A True Blond I Might Just Try That!!! OK, now you’ve started ANOTHER war. (Forum etiquette. Capitalizing the first letter of every word……what are we gonna do with you?)

You said you would post a video on “cold start up”. Please also include a video “after warm up”.

I may be the eternal optimist but “I think” if the car was properly maintained, and you fix the oil leak(s) and use proper oil and filters you may find that you don’t really have a problem at all (just smoking from sitting too long). At least, let’s hope so.

PS. How does it idle when warm? And at what RPMs? Is everything stock?

Keep us updated.

DD

rotarygod

iTrader: (1)

There is no problem with using synthetic oil, short term or long term. I've been using it for years and will use nothing but synthetic. No issues at all. There never will be either.

Lucas oil stabilizer is definitely a bad idea. If your oil needs an additive to work better, you should really just be using a better oil. Lucas does help the oil stay up in part of the engine longer but it foams easier. That's bad news. If you like your engine, avoid it and every other oil additive like the plague.

cpa7man

iTrader: (2)

Totally agree on the dino vs. synthetic debate, but Lucas does work on motors with badly worn oil control rings, I'm not sure why but it does help. Might work the same if we used 50wt oil.

cdrad51

Just use some MMO. (Noticed that is one of the few fluids that HASN'T been mentioned yet, so why not add a little more to the confusion? )

bkg

ouch synthetics and rotary's are a touchy subject

rotarygod

iTrader: (1)

If more people actually had even some knowledge about how a synthetic oil is made and what makes it a "synthetic" (which is a very misleading term), no one would have a problem with them. The only issue against them is a lack of knowledge. The other thing that keeps people in the dark is tech bulletins. Again you need to understand what the intent of those is in relation to how they actually feel about them. It's very different.

jes

For the 1st gen Rx-7, Mazda said synthetic was a no-no... I believe they continued that position through the 3rd gen. For the RX-8, synthetic was recommended... Recently Mazda recalled and is replacing engines in RX-8s in hot climate areas that test with "low compression", read: DEAD engine!, that used synthetic oil!

I'll stick with dino juice in my rotaries, thank you very much!

Nate83SA22

Well....I live in West Palm Beach, Florida it does get pretty hot here and in my FB's owner book for my 83 base model 12A it says that for my temperature range it should use 20W-50 Weight oil, Would it hurt to use 20W-50 Royal Purple Oil? Cause it's a heavy weight but, it's also synthetic so it's probably going thin'in up a bit. Also, Since it's synthetic is it gonna hurt my engine with 177K miles on it.......Has anyone here had any EXPerience with ROYAL PURPLE?

Quicker10u

No actually it isnt...I can add gear lube to my engine as well and it will smoke less..All you are doing is thickening the oil, therefore inhibiting it's ability to do it's job (and it's ability to get past the Oil control rings)..Fix it right, don't half-*** it by band-aiding the problem...If the car is burning enough oil for it to be a problem (barring any external leaks), it has to be rebuilt...

It does work well as an assembly lube though...

85 FB

I run 10W-30 Royal Purple with a K&N Gold Oil Filter. No problems whatsoever. I've also said this to one of the tech guys at the rotary shop and heard no "You shouldn't do that" from them. And, my rotary has over 191K miles on it.

jes

I'm a big fan of K & N air filters, they're in all my cars... So when I ran out of Mazda oil filters about a year ago, I thought I'd try the K & N oil filter. I was rather surprised to see only 5 holes whose total area was less than the 8 holes in the stock Mazda filter... Seems that would restrict the oil flow... So why should I pay over 2x for the K & N?

85 FB

Go to knfilters.com and ask them that. From what I've seen, it's how they're designed internally. Better filtration, anti-drain to reduce oil-starved startups, etc.

jes

That's too obvious! I'll let you know how they respond...

BTW the factory filter has an anti-drain valve too.

85 FB

Y'know, it's been so long since RP Performance did my oil change (They use Mazda filters, too) that I forgot about that. Oh well, I was in the mood to treat my 7 to some nice stuff so I figured a K&N Gold Oil Filter and Royal Purple was the way to go ($45 total for all of it). Now, I just need to change out my transmission fluid and diff. fluid with Royal Purple.

aussiesmg

iTrader: (1)

I use straight Synthetic Amsoil which is good for 7500 miles per change, absolutely no problems for the past 30,000 miles, engine now has 160,000 in total and is driven daily. With premixing I don't use one drop over 7500 miles.

As for the filters its the filter medium which makes the difference, the quality filters have less holes as they filter more efficiently without paper (yes paper) filtering medium in the cheapies.

I'm surprised nobody thought to say its probably a stuck apex seal due to carbon build up, therefore it should free up after the Sythetic cleans the carbon out of the engine, run it hard and clean out the crud. IMHO.

Seafoam will speed up this process, but it will smoke like an Australian Bushfire.

NOCTRNL27

OK, We'll see what happens. We did the oil & filter change today. We used 20W50 Castrol GTX & motor honey. From what we can see the smoke has almost diminished. It's still slightly their but no where near the fogger we had before. We will check over the next few days the leak problem and I will post back. Thanks for all your input.

Forgot to add we took it for a nice long cruise just like we were teenagers again!!

cdrad51

Awwwww.

Kentetsu

Yes, the only way to fix bad oil control rings is to rebuild the engine. No argument there. However, the only problem with my engine was that it would billow smoke out when decelerating from high rpms. Everything else was good, and I have raced it all year with pretty good success (lack of power was never an issue).

So sure, I could have taken the car down in early spring, and spent all of my money rebuilding the engine. But since the engine is still performing fine, and the only issue was the oil smoke, as long as I could control the smoking then I could delay the rebuild. This allowed me to use my funds to by a great many upgrades to the suspension, which was all original and in great need of it. Then I raced all year, and used the car as my daily driver. Now that winter is here, I have a spare engine that I am going to rebuild and port, and next spring that will be going into the car. Works for me...

And as far as Lucas goes, it performed great. The oil smoke was suddenly under control, and I have seen no unwanted side effects from it's use. The "foaming" you mentioned in another thread has never been seen in my "real world" use of this product, and I won't believe that there is a problem with this product until I experience it myself. Now, let me take the time to tell you how I decided to use this stuff in my rotory in the first place...

My wife was using a hedge trimmer while I was washing my car, and it was making a hell of a racket. She was complaining that it wasn't working very well, so I took a look at it and found that it was dry as a bone (like it hadn't been oiled in years). While I was digging around for some oil for it, I found a bottle of Lucas that had been left behind by the previous owner of our house. I read the label, and all of the claims, and thought "yeah, right". So I performed a little test on the stuff:

I grabbed the Lucas along with a bottle of Castrol 20/50. I put a few drops of the Castrol on one side of the blade (at the tip of the hedge trimmer) and a few drops of the Lucas on the other side. Then I started it up and watched how the oil moved down the length of the blade (which was held horizontally). By the time the Castrol had made it down about 1/4 of the length of the blade, the Lucas had already worked its way down the entire length. In fact, you could watch it "stringing" between the teeth of the blade when it was running (kind of hard to describe). By the time the Castrol was 1/2 way down the blade, the Lucas had worked it's way through the center piece and was beginning to lube the Castrol's side of the blade too. I was impressed. I figured that if this stuff could work its way around something like this, then it would probably do the same thing in an engine, which could only be a good thing. When my car started smoking a couple of months later, I figured I'd give it a shot and I've never regretted it.

As I said, it saved me from having to rebuild my motor at a time when the only problem with it was the smoking issue. So again, why rebuild a perfectly performing engine when there is a workable option available to you? Will it fix the problem (which is worn oil control rings)? No, it won't. Will it fix the smoking so that you don't have to rebuild right away? Yes, at least it did for me and several others. Do I think that Lucas is evil, and you should never ever use it? Hell no.

Need more proof? Older Audi V-6s are known to run forever, but have poor lubrication to the heads so the valve train is almost always noisy. I bought a '92, and yes, it was noisy. I was a half a quart down on oil so in goes the Lucas. After less than a minute of idling the engine sounded like new. Now it goes in with every oil change.

So I have my opinion of the stuff, which is based on personal experience. You have your opinion, which as far as I can tell is based on something you read on the internet (and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, lol). Okay, so don't use it. But when you start jumping into any thread where I mention to somebody that it might help them out in their situation (based on my personal experience) and say things like this, it begins to get a little irritating. If you were able to say "I put Lucas in my engine and it blew up. And when I tore it down there was all this gooey stuff from the Lucas and that was the definite cause of the failure." well then I might pay more attention to what you were saying.

Anyway, that is my opinion on Lucas. Peace...