Quote Originally Posted by jason.ruff View Post
I completely agree. We run 2 tugboats with 3 x V12 Caterpillar engines, one vessel has centrifuges and one doesn't. 600 Litre sumps so high volume of oil, but we get twice as long for servicing on the engines with spinners because we remove the carbon and crap. Ours is all sample based oil changes with samples taken every 250Hrs, so we can closely monitor oil condition. We change the oil every 12 months unless required to prior.
Wow that's a big sump, 600 lts and you still had to change it every 250 hrs.

I have had excellent results using Shell oils over the past 30 years but the one experience below was very interesting.

We used to service a fleet of new trucks with 550hp C15 Caterpillar engines. Westrack allowed us to do warranty and service on the engines with strict instructions to only use genuine cat parts and engine oil. Caterpillar had a great system on engine service intervals. The engine oil change interval was based on fuel usage. when the engine computer reached 20,000 lts since last reset it brought up a message on the engine data tagging oil service. In this fleet most trucks travelled 28,000km. Some of the trucks that did more local work set off the warning at 21,000km so it was a very accurate way of determining the best service life of the oil. Of course we also has to do a oil sample every oil change and send it to Westrack. We would get an oil sample test report 48-72 hours later.

One of my mechanics mistakenly put Rimular X in one of these cat powered trucks instead of the genuine Caterpillar oil. I said don't waste 50 lts of oil and run it with the Rimular. The oil sample report come back and Westrack didn't say anything. On the next service the same mechanic decided he would put the Shell Rimular X in again and see how the oil stood up against the cat oil. We told the owner and he didn't have a problem of one truck being on the Shell oil, but we didn't tell Westrack. After the second oil sample test on this truck I got a call from the oil test lab. The Forman in charge of the test lab said what's going on with fleet number 4. I played ignorant and said I don't know why what's wrong. He said what oil are you using and I said the cat oil, he quickly said no your not. Again I said yeah it is. He said bull shit its defently not 15w40 cat oil. I said what's wrong with the oil. He said again they really needed to know what oil I was using in this truck. In the end I said ok sorry one of my mechanics accidently put shell Rimular X 15w40 in it. He then told me that we had made the same mistake twice in the same truck and was picked up in the oil trend reports by the computer in the lab.

I explained we were sorry and it wouldn't happen again. The phone went quiet then he come back and said, the Shell oil we were using out performed their Cat oil by considerable margins. I asked who Caterpillar used to supply oil to them but they wouldn't tell me. He also added that the Rimular X could have easily gone an extra 10-15,000 km than their cat oil. They asked if we would run the whole fleet on the Shell oil and do long term testing. We set the engine computers to 28,000 lts of fuel usage and the oil still out performed the Cat oil. Westrack were very surprised with the results over 18 months. Oil usage was also down and when we removed the rocker covers at 600,000 km for a valve set all the truck engines were spotless like they had only done 5,000 km.

We had Cummins m11 & n14 engines exceed 1,6 million kms and a Detroit 60 series exceed 2.1 million kms on this oil until it broke a piston top.

wbute if your Toyota engines are a 2L 3L or 5L I wouldn't go any further than 5,000km on an oil change, they are renowned for excessively slugging the oil.

And yes oil spinners are oils best friend, a fantastic invention that should be on every diesel engine.