First Oil

[kroberts]

I had the S52 in my swap rebuilt before I installed it. A few of us were discussing motor oil at work yesterday. A guy said that I need to break in my engine on dino oil before I switch to synthetic. He says that synthetic oil is so good that it would allow the rings and bearings the "break in" time they need. It sounds plausible I suppose. In 1997 did M3's come with synthetic or dino oil when new? I was planning on running conventional oil first to clean the engine out, then switching to synthetic after about a week. The Bentley says use 15w40.

Whaddya think?

[houstonh]

blah blah. go with dino change after 1K then change... dino again for another 2-3K.. then go synthetic. Make sure you rev the engine in all ranges to get the rings seated at all rpms.

[nando]

break it in with regular oil - change to synth after you feel the motor is broken in. if you do it right, it really doesn't take very long - I changed to synth after 2000 miles, it's been 20,000 miles since and it runs as well as it did the first day I started it. :)

as far as breaking it in, it's funny but my conceptions 10 years ago were much different than they are now. The first motor I ever broke in when I was 19, I did in fact vary rpms (the idea is to put the rings under compression/vaccum, or accel/decel) but I drove it like a grandma for about 5000 miles. that motor never made much power (although it did have a lot of torque) and it didn't run very well either.

fast forward 10 years or so, with my M20 I (accidentally) redlined it within the first block.. it was in first gear though, so it only stayed there for a few ms. but after that, I basically drove it like I stole it for a week, varied the RPMs (which was fun.. lots of accelerating :) ) and autox'd it for the first time with about 500 miles on it (it was easily broken in by 200 miles). I was careful not to stay at redline very long of course (which was haaard) but I wasn't afraid to drive it. now it will go to 7000rpm all day long and take me anywhere without a hiccup.

[kowalski]

fast forward 10 years or so, with my M20 I (accidentally) redlined it within the first block..

:D accident, I'm sure...