I recently sold my 71 Skylark & "upgraded" to a 69 GS California. ALthough eventually I expect to do a lot of work to her, I'm trying to get her road worthy for now. The amount of goop that I cleaned out of the rocker shafts was unbelievable. I have one constant noisey lifter and a few that come & go. (Oil pressure seems okay) I was hoping to quiet them a bit more without having to take off the intake and replace them. I have had a few old timers tell me to run a mix of oil and kerosene to clean out the goo. I already went the "Marvel Mystery Oil" route, and that helped a bit. Anybody hear of this kerosene method? And if so, what exactly are the specifics in doing this?
If you really want to clean out the motor run pure kerosene in the oil. pull the distributor od run the oil pump with a drill. that would really clear it out. I would drain the kerosene out of the motor, then buy some junk oil, spin the pump with the drill again, run it breifly then fill with good oil and see what happens..
Yes you can mix kerosene with the oil and let it run at idle, dont drive it or rev the motor up let the motor get warm then shut it off, let it cool back down, then do it again. But you do realize that by doing this whatever slugg that breaks lose but doesnt completely break down could get stuck and plug something else.
Thanx for the responses. I did run it for a while with kero in the oil. It did help a little. I agree with the statement about remembering that something may break loose & get plugged elsewhere. I'd let it run longer with the kero in it, but that "crap breaking loose" is what I'm afraid of. Mike
A Trick I Was Tought... I had the same problem many years ago in a V-8 Pontiac. An old timer who work at the same garage as I told me to change the oil and use one quart of transmission fluid... then drive the car about 100mi or so and rechange the oil & filter as normal. I tried it and it really worked well. My very noisy lifters quieted right down. I never heard of useing kerosine but the trans fluid was safe to drive with. May be worth a try.
Atf I agree (for what it's worth), pour in a quart or 2 of ATF with the balance of regular oil and run it a few hundred miles.... I've probably seen this done a couple of hundred times and never (yet) had a problem. regards
Never tried the ATF thing myself but have heard it works really well. My dad said a guy he rode to work with used to put in a quart at every oil change from the time the cars were new and never had an oil related problem. I did run ATF in a 3 speed manuel trans in a 63 Plymouth and it worked great, less drag when power shifting. Dave Berry
I ABSOLUTELY agree about substituting a quart or two with ATF:TU: Done it many times on vehicles with miles, with success in freeing sticky piston rings and cleaning out noisy lifters. I can't say I've ever used more than one quart at a time but IT DOES WORK....ATF is chauked full of detergents.
I used to work for an oil change shop many years ago - we had an expediting truck come in with 60k miles and the oil had never been changed ( they drove about 2k miles a week) - Long story short, the oil that was left in the engine came out in chunks... the guy in the pit had to keep sticking his screwdriver in the drain plug hole to move the chunks out of the way so the oil would continue draining. We filled it up with straight atf and ran it for an hour, then dumped the atf and refilled it with oil. We asked the guy to come back in a week so we could change the oil again and try to get rid of some more of the sludge. He came back in 15k miles later( never changed it in between), and we repeated the process. I really thought he was lucky he got that many miles out of the truck, but it surprised the heck out of everyone there when he came back in at 90k ( again, no changes in between!). I quit sometime after that, and I stopped worrying so much about changing my oil every 3k miles after seeing so many people abuse the heck out of their cars and get away with it... p
Kerosene and oil NEVER,EVER,EVER run kerosene and oil in any engine. :rant: :rant: :rant: :rant: I did and it destroyed the engine. The atf thing works best. :Smarty: Some times you can tap on the rocker arms while the engine is running with a soft hammer and make a noisy lifter pick up. If neither of these things work, replace the lifter. :Brow:
