I’m sure everyone that reads this knows the purpose of motor oil. If not, that’s okay, because I’m going to explain a little about it. Motor oil can actually serve a few different purposes. But the main purpose of it is to lubricate the engine’s moving parts and protect them from corrosion and wear. It also keeps the engine cool and keeps out the junk (debris).

This is more about differentiating between synthetic oil and regular oil though. Regular oil uses crude oil – the kind we get from the ground. It is then sent to a plant and processed into a base oil – into which additives are put. The additives are mainly to create viscosity and to make the oil better able to protect the engine’s parts.

The only difference between regular oil and synthetic is that synthetic oil uses a special type of base oil that makes the molecules of oil all the same, consistent in size. It also changes the weight of the oil, making it ideal for high performance cars. The advantage that synthetic has over regular oil is that the regular oil is made up of different sized molecules, and it has many more impurities. Synthetic oil is much more pure, and the viscosity level is pretty much perfect. Even though the synthetic oil is already much better at this point, even better additives are mixed in, giving it a much greater advantage. This allows the oil to flow better at low temperatures and maintain its viscosity at a wide range of temperatures. Synthetic oil is extremely stable and provides the engine protection from friction, which you do not want. With synthetic oil your engine doesn’t use up as much oil and has less gunky engine deposits that take away from your engine’s overall power and fuel mileage.

I want to say this about switching from regular old motor oil to synthetic. When you switch to synthetic after using regular oil for a long time, you might notice a little leaking of oil. This is because of your old oil leaving sludge and gunk, basically junk, that builds up and clogs up bad engine seals. The synthetic will clean this junk out of your engine, so the seals are exposed, and the oil runs out the seal when it warms up.

Also, I wanted to let you know about engine flushes. If you’ve been using synthetic oil then that’s pretty much eliminated the problem with gunk and sludge. The flushes are supposed to wash out this. If you do have an engine with sludge, then a flush is the last thing that you want to do. Here’s why: if your engine does really have a sludge build up it can clog the passages and really complicate things. Most of the time flushes are not needed. If you use synthetic oil you’re probably okay, and if you have sludge you definitely don’t need it done. There are other ways to get the gunk out.

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