Oil change and new oil
I changed the oil in my VW Golf tonight. Yesterday, I received the Pela oil extractor from UPS. It was pretty beefy compared to my other smaller extractor, and it seems like a solid piece of hardware. The pump seems more durable, and the suction seems more powerful. Maybe it’s my imagination, but that was my initial opinion after using for the first time.
Before the oil change, I took a sample of oil from the oil pan using a vacuum pump sampler. I bought an oil analysis kit from Oil Analyzers that came with a prepaid shipping label. I filled it up with the pump, changed the oil, and will send it off tomorrow. After some positive feedback from using Mobil 1 Turbo Diesel Truck 5W40 oil in PD engines, I decided to give it a try instead of the normal VW spec 505.01. At tdiclub.com, there are more and more people having camshaft and lifter problems in their PD engines, even though they used the VW spec oil. Either the oil isn’t as good as VW claims, or the design of the engine isn’t as robust as their older diesel engines. Either way, I want to try to limit the damage the oil could have caused; I’m going to try using the Mobil 1 oil for a couple iterations, while taking samples between the 10K oil change interval to track the progress of the oil. It *should* do better than the VW oils, since the Mobil 1 oil is a better synthetic. We’ll see!
Soon, I’ll change the timing belt too. Everyone recommends that the valve cover be removed to inspect the camshaft and lifters, so I’ll be doing that as well. Hopefully my cam and lifters are okay. Even if they don’t look okay, I’m not entirely sure I’ll do anything about it. More than likely, I’ll just keep trying to minimize the future damage. A new cylinder head from metalmanparts.com costs about $1700, which would include everything I would need to replace (hopefully), should there be a problem. At least I know the approximate dollar amount of the fix for a hypothetical worst case problem.
I’ll post the lab results from the ~8100 mile sample from my car. I’m not entirely sure it’s an 8100 mile sample because I don’t remember the exact mileage of my last oil change. I know I always change it at roughly the 10,000 mile interval, but it may have been a couple hundred miles over or under the 90,000 mile mark. I’ll track the mileage a little better now, especially since I have to put the info on the labels for the lab to track.