KEEPING THE TRUCK HEALTHY

Get under that truck, and grease it! OFTEN!! As with all lubricants, purchase and use the highest quality you can comfortably afford.

 

Lucas is great product. But what oil are you adding it to?
Everyone will have their "opinion" on DEF. There are retail chains that have great deals on boxed, and sell a ton of it every day keeping the stuff fresh. Even the Kroger grocery stores like near me is the Fred Meyer division of Kroger, has fuel stations. The Boxed DEF there is darn'near still warm from the reaction at the manufacturer. So if you find a nation wide retailer with fuel stations and can use their other products too like groceries etc., just keep your DEF tank topped with a couple boxes. When you find it on sale at the retailer, buy a couple extra and lock them in your binder box.

Before each reset or any vacation etc, top your tanks. Condensation inside the fuel tanks is death on the fuel filtration system. Always keep an extra Davco element in your bunk box, and know how to replace it. If your Davco has a drain plug instead of valve, consider replacing it with a valve. That is assuming Detroit has that style filter in the system in 2022.?

Don't overlook our transmission fluid maintenance. Like you're considering increasing the frequency of engine oil changes, consider that with the transmission and differentials as well.
IMO.

 

I use Rotella 15-40 no oil additives, I change my oil every 12k, I have 3406E Cat. I use automatic transmission fluid to keep the injectors clean. I grease my truck every 2 weeks. Check your tire air pressure every week.

 

Wow, you spend WAY more on oil than you need to.

My first company decided to actually do a test to see if there is any harm done to an engine by doing extended change intervals so they took a truck and did I believe it was 75000 mile oil changes on it. That or 100,000 mile, I don't remember. At 450,000 miles they tore the engine down to see how it survived. You could still see the crosshatch pattern in the sleeves. Everything on the engine spec'ed to new. The mechanic said this engine could go to a million miles like this without question. The truck was an old Cascadia with the DD15 and a standard tranny. And Ozark hauls a crap ton of those big heavy rolls of paper with international paper so that truck worked hard for its life. Every IP load I ever took in or out was 78k to 80k. They decided to stop selling every truck at 500k and keep some. I STILL see trucks that had over 500k when I drove there in 2017 running around. They MUST be over a million miles now, and still going down the road.

So you can change 14 gallons of oil every month if you want to, but you don't need to. You're simply wasting money. And they used Rotella T as well, it's #### good oil, you don't have to change it that often.

Grease is cheap and air is free, so you can do that as much as you want to without it hurting the bottom line.

 

What has been your experience with an E model cat?

 

Lucas is a waste of money imo, except if the truck is getting a little wore out and needs some psi in a bottle. And if it does GL4 gear lube does a better job.

 

Here's what can happen with those "fleet maintained" 75,000 mile oil changes ESPECIALLY on these newer "clean air" trucks...

It's the soot packing that destroys them... Draining the oil frequently helps the problem...

I'll stick with my 12k mile oil changes on this 2020 cummins, you do you.

 

Um, I stated that the engine was torn down to the last bolt and spec'ed. It was not only clean, it spec'ed to new.

If you never change the oil, like in that video, then you've got REAL big problems.

I've driven a dozen trucks with at LEAST 50k mile interval oil changes, and some had 75k. I never had an engine issue. I had DPF problems, but you can change your oil daily and have those. I've been looking for that video my company made, I guess they pulled it. It was on youtube a while back.

One of the trucks I drove was a 2019 Cummins and they were very picky about making sure it didn't exceed 50k. Cummins are nasty dirty engines with loose tolerances that make a lot of carbon and alot of contaminants during combustion. They are basically 70's tech in a modern engine. Modern much better engines with better materials and tolerances can go much further. One thing about that Cummins, I sure made a lot of Love's points!

Just like old cars needed oil changes more often than new cars do. The materials the engines were made of, the tolerances AND the oil quality all made for 3000k mile changes almost mandatory. Now you can double that and you're fine, 7500 is even fine. Oh yea, and they do it putting out like 1/10th the pollution.

That's real quality.

 

I don't agree. I have over 1.2 million on my engine, including 1.2 on the injectors. It burns between a half a gallon to a gallon between oil changes, depending on how much I idle the truck. Which is normal. I had rods and mains done, a few years ago. I do oil samples every other oil change, and the samples come back normal. I haven't overhauled it because of the low oil consumption and good oil samples.