replying to Paintedcow, Ouisie wrote:
I used Arco Graphite oil in my first car, a 1972 Ford Maverick with a 200
cubic inch straight 6 cylinder engine and 3 speed manual transmission. I
seemed to work well, nothing fantastic, just worked well, except for one
problem - the viscosity of the oil seemed, visually anyway, to be far lower
than anything I'd ever seen before but I figured that that was the idea, so
the graphite could do the work of lubricating with minimum viscous
resistance/damping, which sounded great. But in practice, this combination of
the 'super' lubricant, graphite, and the very low viscosity of the oil allowed
this SOOT BLACK oil to slowly but surely seep out everywhere - the gaskets
that easily held back higher viscosity conventional motor oil didn't do very
well holding back Arco Graphite and while it didn't actually leak in the
conventional sense, such as by dripping oil, it did succeed in a few months,
in coating the entire engine compartment with a filthy, sticky, greasy jet
black graphite luster which ultimately resulted in total dread at the very
though of opening the hood much less having to actually touch anything under
there. Even after getting the engine and engine compartment steam cleaned and
changing back to nice, CLEAN conventional oil, that filthy black liquid Soot
refused to be completely removed, and I suspect that THAT was the reason for
its disappearance, and GOOD RIDDANCE!!
Of course, now I'm scared to try any kind of 'new' 21st Century oil because of
my Arco Graphite experience, although I do use oil additive Restore.
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