oil changes

I did not want to hijack the synthetic oil change thread, but it brought up something I have found odd. I schedule all the maintenance on a large fleet of industrial equipment and it all calls for an oil change every 250 Hours which is 4 times a year if ran a good solid 8 hours a day.

Now lets say I drive my car 50 MPH for 250 hours that is 12,500 miles of course the manufacturer recommends an oil change every 3000-5000 miles is my car engine such a P.O.S. compared to a forklift engine???



V/r HT1

most oil changes are factored with dirt use or other forign debris entering the engine from use so a forklift is not going to see the same abuse perhaps as a vehicle driving across a varied road surfaces .
most car owners manuals tells if you see a lot of off road use change oil at this amount miles so on.

This kinda goes along with NRF was saying:

I was reading up on high performance air filters awhile back and one of the manufacturers was saying that the reason your oil gets dirty is because of what the air filter misses. Fine dust gets drawn into the motor through the inlet side of of the crankcase.

Going with what HT1 pointed out: Think of all the eighteen wheelers running nearly 24/7 over the highways. There are two drivers in the truck with each driving a ten hour shift. At 55 mph they would probably be logging somewhere around 1,100 miles a day.

Didn't want to create confusion in the synth oil thread but they go really long intervals between oil changes. Somewhere around 30 - 50 thousand miles ?

Just guessing but most run Delvac synthetic. They have an oil bath air filter. They have auxiliary oil coolers and gallons of oil stored down in the base pan.

Back in the day, my old Ford pickups used eight quarts for an eight cylinder oil change. Nowadays i buy my oil in a five quart jug. Seems like an oddball size but it's just enough for most oil changes now.

Maybe that's part of the difference between heavy equipment and automobiles ?

I've worked with a couple of guys that logged over a million miles when i was plowing snow. The story i got from them was different. Can't remember exactly what the oil change intervals were but they seemed awfully long at the time.

This might help explain why:

How often / How much? (Oil Change Question) | TruckersReport.com Trucking Forum | #1 CDL Truck Driver Message Board

1100 miles for an otr team they are lazy truck stop cowboys .
I logged in average myself in a day non team at around a 1000 miles a day for one year only 7 days off.

I said industrial equipment. maybe construction equipment would be better term, my equipment is in a dusty nightmare far worse off them my car.
I can buy into the diesel engines are better because they generally run at one RPM all the time(balls out) so they can be optimized for that.

but the guy under the tin foil hat thinks there is some built in breakage here, maybe the oil filters on our cars are poor, and the ones on our equipment are better... remember when those big american engines had HUGH oil filters,
my foreign car has one the size of the one on my lawn tractor.

I remember when I was in the Navy. Honda gave my unit an award for our maintenance program, we had a record number of hours on a Honda 135 over twice the expected life expectancy of the motor "2000 hours" we where laughing our ass off we had a couple of engines with 8000 hours! these where security boats they ran 24-7 mostly at idle. we ran them a week 168 hours give or take so every week the entire fleet was switched out so the maintenance could be done 150Hr oil change. Honda never really intended for 135 and 150 to be used anyway but recreationaly which would make 1000 hours a milestone.

How did you manage that if you were crossing DOT scales at the state lines??

yes set the cc at 70-75 for 11 hours with 2 5 minute breaks with the fuel range at 1000+ miles per fill up(two 150 ga tanks .
no traffic mostly at 7pm-7am drives so no city traffic mostly open roads

About 25 years ago we toured the Fleetguard filter plant. They had a demonstration on air filtration for diesel engines which we were shown a bottle with 4 oz. of fine dust. We were told that is the amount of dust that would cause the rings to fail in the live of the engine, if it was poured in all at once or over thousands of hours it would cause the failure on the majority of engines.

Not sure if it worked that way in the real world, but this was there lab results.