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ORIGINAL: z28pete
All it is is a very heavy lubricant. Works initially but breaks down quickly, and then you are back with a smoker. Don't believe that crap about the lubricant penetreting into the metal either.
It's main ingredient is PTFE, commonly known as the Dupont trademark: Teflon. These product have tiny particles of the stuff, or "flakes" in the additive, literally a solid suspended in a liquid. While these products may have some short term benifits in quieted engine parts etc, most have been found to do long term damage to your engine. Some literally even tell you to shake the product on the back of the can. This solid can clog up your filters, and oil passageways in lifters and other areas of the engine. They do much more harm than they could ever do good, just change your oil every 3k and use a quality filter and that is the best thing you can do for your engine.
READ: Snake Oil!:Is That Additive Really A Negative?
Article and Photos by Fred Rau
ROAD RIDER/August 1992/Pg 15
Information for this article was compiled from reports and studies by the University of Nevada Desert Research Center, DuPont Chemical Company, Avco Lycoming (aircraft engine manufacturers), North Dakota State University, Briggs and Stratton (engine manufacturers), the University of Utah Engineering Experiment Station, California State Polytechnic College and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Lewis Research Center.
Road Rider does not claim to have all the answers. Nor do we care to presume to tell you what to do. We have simply tried to provide you with all the information we were able to dredge up on this subject, in hopes it will help you in making your own, informed decision.
You Can't Tell The Players Without A Program
On starting this project, we set out to find as many different oil additives as we could buy. That turned out to be a mistake. There were simply too many avail able! At the very first auto parts store we visited, there were over two dozen different brand names available. By the end of the day, we had identified over 40 different oil additives for sale and realized we needed to rethink our strategy.
First of all, we found that if we checked the fine print on the packages, quite a number of the additives came from the same manufacturer. Also, we began to notice that the additives could be separated into basic "groups" that seemed to carry approximately the same ingredients and the same promises.
In the end, we divided our additives into four basic groups and purchased at least three brands from three different manufacturers for each group. We defined our four groups this way:
1.) Products that seemed to be nothing more than regular 50-rated engine oil (including standard additives) with PTFE (Teflon TM) added.
2.) Products that seemed to be nothing more than regular 50-rated engine oil (including standard additives) with zinc dialkyldithiophosphate added.
3.) Products containing (as near as we could determine) much the same additives as are already found in most major brands of engine oil, though in different quantities and combinations.
4.) Products made up primarily of solvents and/or detergents.
There may be some differences in chemical makeup within groups, but that is impossible to tell since the additive manufacturers refuse to list the specific ingredients of their products. We will discuss each group individually.
The PTFE Mystery
Currently, the most common and popular oil additives on the market are those that contain PTFE powders suspended in a regular, over-the-counter type, 50-rated petroleum or synthetic engine oil. PTFE is the common abbreviation used for Polytetrafloeraethylene, more commonly known by the trade name "Teflon," which is a registered trademark of the DuPont Chemical Co
what a waste of time
