On Friday I asked you guys what synthetic oil you used. I was expecting Mobil 1 to come out on top, but not by this margin. Mobil 1 got almost half of the 180+ votes we received. Castrol came in a distant second, followed by Royal Purple. I was also expecting the cultish Amsoil people to ambush the comments, but it didn’t happen. Another interesting result was how heavily you blog readers skew to the Northeast. See the poll results and Google voter map after the jump.

Continue reading "Mobil 1 Dominates CarDomain's Synthetic Oil Survey" »

Nate asked me to ask what synthetic oil you guys use, as he’s getting ready to switch to full synthetic in his 2005 Mustang GT. It’s kind of a big decision, since most people seem to agree that once you start using a given brand of synthetic oil in a particular car, you should stick with it. So what do you guys use? Vote and then let us know why in the comments.

Inspired by Jen, I got a drip pan to put under my leaky old Mopar–I figured my landlady wouldn’t be too thrilled if she ever waded into the Valdez-like disaster on the garage floor. Anyway, I found this Rothko-esque mix of Dexron-III and SAE 15W-40 after letting it sit for six weeks. How much does your car leak?

Continue reading "How Much Does Your Car Leak?" »

The big Seattle area Mopar show is just two weeks away so I decided I better give my Satellite some attention. It received its annual sponge bath, plus I cleaned the wheels up a bit (ok, so I’m not too big on detailing). I was also going to change the oil, but then I realized that I had depleted my stash of Rotella T, which I’ve been running in my Mopar for the last five years. I drove down to the local parts store, and they were out of Rotella. Then I remembered this post by Dan Strohl over at Hemmings and decided I better do a bit of research before either switching brands or driving across town to buy the latest version of Rotella.

So there’s been a lot of hysteria on the message boards about the new CJ-4 standard and the lowering of of the zinc content that our old engines need. A little research on Moparts and the H.A.M.B. revealed that the amount of zinc in Rotella T has indeed dropped, but only to 1200ppm, which is still a farily healthy amount of zinc. I have about a quart of Rotella left, so I’ll probably buy one more gallon of Rotella T, then next time I may switch over to Delo 400, which reportadly has a tad more zinc.

What did you do this weekend?