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which oil is good to use?

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Old 07-11-09, 01:15 PM
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1stgen 12A = use synthetic oil

First hand experience...I don't run it anymore because I'm boycotting all Mobil1 products, but I used to run only Mobil1 red cap full synthetic oil in my 1980 RX-7. It had a Derale electric fan but this was back in the day when Derale was first getting into the aftermarket fan business for cars. The little barrel style fuse holder they suppplied for the 30A fuse was a freakin' joke and it literally melted away the tabs so that it couldn't close anymore...I found this out whilst driving home from work on Eastbound I-20 from Dallas to Arlington.

While the car was moving, it was OK. When I got to the gridlock, that's when I watched the temp needle rise and I wondered what the McHeck was going on. When it got to the halfway mark, I pulled over but let the engine keep running. Lo and behold, no fan. The fuse holder had fallen apart and the fuse was gone. Since I had soldered and shrunk wrap everything and pulled it all tight, I couldn't pull the wires close enough for a crazed attempt to wrap them together.

I jumped in the car, still running, and rode the shoulder with people honking at me, some trying to go over to stop me or force me off the road. Eventually, I ran out of shoulder and had to get into the traffic again. I danced like that for the rest of the 18 mile drive home with that temperature needle hovering at 90% of the top of the gauge arc. When I hit my driveway, I ran out, left the engine running and grabbed the water hose. I ran water over the radiator fins for 20 minutes to get the temps down to the 1/4 mark before shutting off the engine.

With plain oil...that engine would have been dead on the road. I've had a coolant loss before, watched the temps get to the just above the 3/4 mark and lost an engine with plumes of smoke to enrage everyone around me. The Mobil1 synth oil behaved just like you saw in those old commercials. It didn't bake or die and it saved that engine ~ which sits on a cradle today since I destroyed that '80 RX-7 chassis a year and a half after that engine near miss experience.

Why would the Mazda reps say such things as quoted above? They don't want ANY changes from what went out the door for warranty purposes. The fact is that racers regularly find out more in a single racing season about what works or what is harmful to their engines than the regular engineers will find out in years of development and testing of that same class of engines.

Once it's broken in, every engine should be on synthetic, it can be an engine saver.


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