The Tappet Brothers
Car Talk Plaza
Box 3500 - Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA 02238

Dear Sirs:

I listened with great interest to the caller who admitted to not changing the oil in his car and your subsequent revelations. Well, if the secret is finally out, then I can foreswear my thirty-year-old promise to keep it all quiet.

I was involved with a research team at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in the early sixties. I will not give the project (1) name so as to not expose my fellow workers to danger, but I can tell you that the results of our experiments closely paralleled your radio discussion. By now my A.E.C. "Q" clearance has expired and if anyone has a 'need-to-know' it's you two!

In our research we would gather random samples of drain oil from gas stations in a 100 mile radius of the Lab for our testing. (An historical note; in the 60’s you could still buy drain oil for whatever you wanted: keeping the dust down in your dirt driveway, polishing military vehicles, lubing your lawnmower, etc.) Our technicians would drive into these gas stations in a smoking, tappet-rattling 1936 Dodge with a re-built '42 engine and ask for a couple of quarts of drain oil. Little did the attendant suspect that the oil went into a special holding tank hidden in the Dodge's oil pan.

Our laboratory analysis revealed that motor oil has two main components: LDLs (low density lipocarbons - also referred to as "bad" oil) and HDLs (high density lipocarbons or "good" oil.) The ratio varied with the age (i.e.: time in engine) of the oil. New motor oil has a very high percentage of LDLs. The LDLs are characterized by a tendency to convert quickly to white smoke. The HDLs simply lubricate the engine.

The picture that began to emerge was that in a new car it took a mean of 9,500 miles before the bad oil was burned off and the good oil could do its work properly. Obviously, if the oil were changed before that period the good oil never got to work and the engine began to wear. As the car got older, care went down, oil consumption increased but oil changes typically decreased so that the engine wear also dropped off. This, of course, is the reason for people saying things like, "Yup, I hated to let that old Chevvy go - the trannie went out and I couldn't afford a new one, but that engine, I thought it would go on forever!"

It is clear that we have been hoodwinked into worrying about engine break-in while completely ignoring the concept of breaking-in the motor oil.

The theory that we developed was that if the oil were never, ever, changed, the bad oil would burn off in 12-15K miles and even though oil would be added occasionally the residual percentage of good oil would hold at a fairly steady 83.95%, assuring almost no engine wear.

There was a company at that time in Cucamonga, CA (Foreveroil, Inc.) who had even developed for public use a good/bad ratio meter that would hang under your dashboard with hog rings and give you a readout of the quality of your engine oil. Unfortunately their plant was destroyed late on a Saturday night in 1962 by a driverless, unmarked gasoline tanker. The owners never pursued the project after the accident.

It certainly is a relief for me to get this out of my system and into public hands after so many years. I hope it is of value to you and your listeners.

Yours truly,

James S. Jardine
Owner
J. E. S.

(1) But I can say that it was a part of:

Project Plowshare, established in 1957 by the Department of Energy, known at the time as Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), was part of the "Atoms for Peace Program". It gained its name from an Old Testament passage in the book of Isaiah, "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares". The purpose of the project was to investigate safe and economic applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

This information was copied from the State of Colorado website.

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