treks

Thanks @Barry, you explained that very well. And yes, you would have to block one of the tail pipes with whatever you have at hand.

@Rahimdad, the reason why we use compressors is that normal exhaust pressure is only about 4 PSI. On my last trip through Africa my vehicle weighed 3 800kg fully loaded, so lifting that weight by using the exhaust places too much strain on the exhaust and the engine, and in particular, on the head gaskets. Here it it is not a problem if you break something because help is a phone call away, but in the depths of Africa, help could be a thousand miles and several days away- hence the reason why we use compressors to inflate the jacks. It only takes about six minutes with a compressor, so it is really not a problem.

@Danny, I would not advise trying to repair the tire, because you have no idea how badly the sidewall and/or tread reinforcing plies may be damaged. Hitting an object hard enough to cause a tear in a tire almost always damages the underlying structures, so if I were you, I'd play it safe and replace the tire.

@Barry, you won't believe how useful these jack can be- I use them on my trips through Africa all the time. They are particularly useful to fill in deep holes in washed out tracks; you place one or two in the hole, inflate them with a compressor, and voila, you have an instant "bridge".

Now why didn't I think of that first....

You are right of course, but it could be argued that you are not filming any a person- you are recording a dangerous, illegal act, which tailgating clearly is. After all, shopping malls record everyone coming through the doors, and they sure as hell do not have anybody's permission.

Happens all the time, and mostly, we have have no idea how dangerous modern cars are. If you really want to be shocked, look over this site- https://www.nhtsa.gov/ Here you can see safety issues you did not even know existed.

@Barry provides an excellent description of the difference between a professional technician, and a hack mechanic who should not be allowed to work on a wheelbarrow, much less a Honda 50. I also use the scanner Barry mentions in his post, and for any doubters out there, my machine sometimes catches pending codes that my dealer-grade Bosch equipment misses. The foregoing just to say that if you need codes extracted, @Barry has the equipment to do it.

They are hoping you put the wrong oil in the engine- just so they can sell you a new engine when the one running with the wrong oil blows up.

Asking which brand of oil is the best out of the three you mention, is like asking which colour of paint is best- red, blue or green. All three brands have both good and bad characteristics, and how well each works depends on the engine, driving style, fuel quality, environmental conditions (heat, dust, humidity), and how well the PCV system on that engine works. The best thing to do therefore is to try all three brands, and see which gives you the best fuel economy and throttle response. You may also find that the engine runs cooler with some brands of oil, so combine all these factors, choose the brand of oil that works best for you, and then stick to that brand and formulation.

Many data link connectors look the same in that they have 16 pins, but some are wired differently, which is why some readers cannot connect to the ECU. If you have the right adapter, the wiring sorts itself out, and contact between the scanner and the ECU can be established.

@Barryis right- quick lube joints are a plague upon the face of the earth, and they should be eradicated. How to do this is perhaps a topic for another discussion though. @desertdude is also right when he says that heat is one of the biggest factors that break down oil, but heat does not break down the base oil- heat breaks down the additives in the oil, and especially the detergents, which is mainly what causes the sludge that Barry found in the engine he shows in his post. However, ambient heat is not the problem. The real problem is that the ultimate temperature the oil reaches, (as Gaurav correctly points out), moisture in the oil, poor quality additives, and mixing different brands of oil all combine to reduce the overall lubricity of the oil in the engine. Let’s look at each factor- 1.) Moisture collects in all engines when they cool down. Eventually, this moisture combines with the sulfur in the base oil, and when this mix is heated as the engine warms up, you end up with sulfuric acid when certain combustion products are added to the mix. There is nothing anyone can do about this- it is a simple chemical reaction that occurs in all engines that use mineral oil. 2.) Some oil manufacturers use the cheapest additives they can find, but more importantly, they do not always balance the proportions of these additives to ensure efficient lubrication from one production batch to the next. For instance, friction modifiers need viscosity improvers to prevent the friction modifiers from settling out, so if they do not add enough viscosity improver of the correct type and grade, you may end up with all the friction modifiers in the bottom of the sump, instead of being evenly distributed throughout the oil matrix. 3.) NO two oil companies use the same additive packages in their final product, even though their spec sheets “confirm” that the product meets or exceeds any number of specifications. Thus, it often happens that when you mix different brands of oil, you end up with a mix where one type of additive interferes with the function of the same type of additive in the oil already in the engine. This happens more with detergents and anti-foaming agents, and it can even happen that two different detergents can “cancel” each other out, which means that the oil mix in an engine may have no, or very little cleaning properties Then there is the issue of oil standards. For instance, oil that conforms to the America SAE standard does not have to take into account the special needs that same engines may have. All American oil has to do is pass the crude standards of the Clean Air Act, and then just barely. By comparison, European oil standards require that all oil grades bearing the ACEA (European Automobile Manufacturers' Association) seal must comply with standards that are specified by European car manufacturers, which is why sludge in European engines is unheard of in Europe. This has nothing do with European sensibilities; it has to do with proper quality control standards, which state (among other things) that all ACEA oils of any given grade must all contain additives of the same quality, and in the same amounts, regardless of who the ACEA-approved oil manufacturer is. Overall, and because all things are NOT equal when it comes to engine oil, I agree with @Gaurav when he says that the onus is on the car owner to make sure he gets the oil that is best for his particular vehicle. However, I will be the first to admit that this is not an easy thing to do in a market where used oil can be collected, mechanically filtered, and then sold as “virgin oil”. Thus, the only real advice I have is for people to stick to the oil grade and brand recommended by the manufacturers of their vehicles, and NEVER to mix oil brands, even if they are of the same grade. How often oil is changed is largely up to individuals, and if they can afford it, there is nothing wrong with replacing oil more frequently than the manufacturer of their vehicle specifies, but there is really no need to replace oil every 3000, or even 5000 km. This is just wasting money. However, oil change intervals should NEVER exceed recommended times, but changing oil a few thousand KM earlier cannot do any harm, and especially on vehicles with 15 000 km (or longer) oil change intervals. Bear in mind that the additive problem applies to synthetic oil as much as it does to mineral oil, since synthetic oil is nothing by an improved version of mineral oil that is distilled from various hydrocarbon-rich gases. Synthetic base oils also require additives to work, but because the molecules in synthetic oils are all the same size, this type of oil lasts longer because the load of lubricating the engine is shared equally among all the molecules, which is not the case with mineral oil. Nonetheless, new generation synthetic oils do NOT mix well with ANY other oils, including most old- generation synthetic oils, so if you want to use synthetic oil in an engine that is not designed specifically for synthetic oil, make damn sure you get the right synthetic oil that will mix with what you have in your engine now, or, end up with the amount of sludge Barry found in the engine he shows.

Seems I was right all along- either a damaged valve, or non-functional valve lifter.

@desertdude, I respectfully disagree with everything you say, and repeat what I said earlier- you, and others are dishing out bad advice that is based on misinformation, half-truths, and dare I say it, contradictions. Strawmen? My nearly forty years experience as an engine builder as well as a formal qualification in lubrication technology would suggest that I know whereof I speak when I say that diesel oil is bad for a petrol engine, regardless of the shape of the tappet. But here goes nothing... You contradict yourself. Besides, it is not the ZDDP (a form of zinc), that damages cat converters, it is the sulfur used in conjunction with ZDDP that can sometimes damage converters. What makes old Land Rover engines different from any other engine that has flat tappets, petrol engines included? Especially given the "fact" that ZDDP has been removed from petrol oil? What lubricates the tappet/camshaft wear surface in these engines? True, but these oils contain specially designed additive packages that can never perform as well as an additive package that was designed for either petrol or diesel oil. The result of this is that the best qualities of both petrol and diesel oil are lost in the mix, which means that engines that run dual purpose oil are deprived of a large part of the lubricity of the oil. The only way to limit the damage caused by poor lubricity is to replace the oil every five minutes, which is what fleet owners using fleet oil do. What does this diagram prove exactly, given the fact that viscosity and lubricity have nothing to do with each other? You further say that- Why would anybody go against "manufacturers' recommendations", when that manufacturer has spent billions to develop an engine, and to test that engine to make sure that it will last if the "recommended" oil is used, and replaced at scheduled intervals? What does it prove when you change the oil at a fraction of the recommended service interval? If you do this, how do you know how "well" your oil of choice, as opposed to the recommended oil, works? In short, how do you know that your "2 cents worth" is better than the oil the engine was designed to run on? These questions are not "strawmen". These are valid questions that need clarification before as I said previously, some innocent soul destroys his engine because he believed someones' "2 cents worth" above the recommendations of the manufacturer of his car.

I disagree. These drivers must have solid vanadium balls.

Thanks @Barry, but I knew that. However, I was trying to figure out the connection between flat tappets and the use of diesel oil in petrol engines, especially since more than 95% of internal combustion engines ever made during the last 100 years or so have, or have had, flat tappets. By implication, this means that almost all petrol engines can (according to some posters here) be run on diesel oil, which is clearly a ridiculous notion. In my professional opinion, the idea that diesel oil can be used in any petrol engine without damaging the engine is bad advice, and I would advise the poster(s) who advocate this practice to research the topic properly before some innocent soul ruins an engine because they listened to an uninformed opinion.

I happen to know something about both engines and oil, but I still fail to see the connection between diesel oil and the so-called "flat tappet" engine. What is a "flat tappet" engine exactly, and what makes diesel oil the preferred oil to use in such engines? In my professional experience, the shape of the tappet has nothing to do with how the both the tappet and the camshaft wears when the wrong oil is used, but then again, I have always used oils recommended by the manufacturers, so I have no experience with using oil in engines that were not designed to use that oil. So can anybody help me out here, and explain about this "flat tappet" business? And when exactly zinc was banned as a friction modifier? Or why the molecules in synthetic oil are all of the same size? Thanks guys, much appreciated!

@victoreyour friend is right- diesel oil is perfect- for diesel engines. The problem with using diesel oil in a petrol engine is that the additives in diesel oil are designed to deal with the combustion products of diesel fuel, which are vastly different from the combustion products of petrol, which why oil change intervals on diesels are so much shorter than on petrol engines, even after adding tons of additives to the oil. Moreover, the additives in diesel oil can take up as much as 35% of the volume of the oil, meaning that you only have 65% oil in any given volume, as against the 15% - 20% of additives in petrol oil. Add to this the fact that diesel additives are not effective against petrol combustion products, and you end up using a lubricant in a petrol engine that only contains about 65% oil. Oil by itself does not lubricate an engine- that is taken care of by additives called "friction-modifiers", but in a petrol engine, the combustion products break down the friction modifiers in diesel oil much sooner than it would have done in petrol oil. The nett result is that you lose the lubrication properties of the additives much sooner, and you have no way to prevent the formation of sludge because the detergents and solvents in diesel oil does not clean up petrol combustion products very well. Think of it this way- if car manufacturers thought that diesel oil would worked as well in petrol engines as it it does in diesel engines, they would not have prescribed petrol oil. Using diesel oil in a petrol engine is not a good idea.

Apart from anything else, this Morgan definitely belongs in the "Ugliest Car Ever Made" category.

The real problem with this silly statement is that in aircraft, autopilot systems actually work. One would have expected more from a man that designed a rocket that can land upright on a ship after delivering a satellite to space.

Let's hope that the people who want to make driver-less cars for the general market take note of this, especially Tesla, who just cannot seem to stop their driver-less cars crashing into buses and whatnot.

I spend a lot of time in Southern Africa, (South Africa in fact) where I still own a car repair shop that I visit from time to time, and I have seen the worst of Chinese cars there. I have seen them all, Geely, GWM, Chana, and a few others, and in my opinion as a professional mechanic, Chinese cars are among the worst vehicles in the world. Shoddy assembly, atrocious build quality, barely functioning electronics, and OBD II systems that date from the early 90's are the primary reasons why these vehicles cannot be imported into in the US. @Barry mentions GWM: This is a collection of various parts from Isuzu, Nissan, Toyota and other out-of-western-production pick-up trucks that manages to lose the best qualities of each donor brand with the result that nothing works as designed. There are other examples of the Chinese trying to resuscitate obsolete models and technologies, but I think I have made my point. Nonetheless, some of the US regulations have been relaxed, so some of the later Chinese models may be allowed there soon. @Barryis right about Korean cars though. When they first appeared in the West, all mechanics thought that they have seen the worst the world has to offer, but all of them, myself included, had been proven wrong- which I am happy to admit.

There is something distinctly creepy about this marriage between Volvo and Geely... I will bet money on it that Geely will eventually drag Volvo down to Chinese "standards", instead of aspiring to reach Swedish sophistication. There might just be something to the Americans' view that Chinese cars are unsafe and unreliable, which is why they don't allow them on American soil.

@Barry even has a license to breed Pajeros. He posted pictures of his prime breeding pair some time ago...

...or you'll be walking home!