Re: Freezing Oil

["Brant M. Miller" <brant@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John -

Thanks for the good info.  As a warm-weather person (I live in the San
Francisco area.  Today's snow is reportedly the first in 20 years.) I did=

not know from experience about the effect of pour point, or something dar=
n
near like it, until a couple of years ago.  I worked thru a winter in
western Kazakhstan.  Normal daytime highs were -20C to -10C and overnight=
s
dipped to -40C to -30C.  We had a fleet of Niva's - a small Russian 4-whe=
el
drive vehicle that was only marginal at the best of times.  They were not=

easy to start in the morning.  That was not surprising.  What did surpris=
e
me was that, after starting them and warming them a bit with the clutch
disengaged, engaging the clutch with the transmission in neutral and the
throttle full open would stall the engine.  The resistance caused by
congealed oil in the transmission exceeded the torque available from the
engine!

Just to correlate your temperature scale, boogers also freeze at -20C, bu=
t
not at -10C.

Brant

>Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1998 23:10:40 -0800 (PST)
From: bolhuijo@domain.elided
Subject: <MISC> freezing oil

 I took my own measurements of
the pour point. (Pour point being defined as 5 degrees warmer than the
point where the oil sample does not visibly move when inclined.)  I
got -55F for the 0w and -42F for the 20w.  It becomes very obvious
when you see this that pour point is nowhere near what you could
expect your engine to pump.

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