I don't get the cost savings non-sense either. I thought that I'd save some money because my 2005 Excursion required oil changes at 7500 miles instead of 5000 miles. When I noticed that my 6.0 Excursion liked 5000 mile oil changes better, that's what I kept doing despite the cost.
As a matter of fact, following Ford's interval cost me an engine, so I'm well past Ford or any automotive manufacturer's maintenance recommendations.

Ignoring Ford's service interval recommendations has helped my personal vehicles last a long time and spend little to no time in a service bay. My 2001 7.3 Excursion bought new with 50 miles now has 612,000 miles on the original engine. My 2005 Excursion bought October 2013 with 123K now has 247K on it. The fleets and customer vehicles I manage and maintain spend more time running awesome and making my customers money and less time in my service bays. To the owners of these vehicles, the service intervals I keep have saved them from the one thing that costs them a ton of money: A broken down truck.

I'm often able to catch serious issues before they become a problem and can plan a maintenance window with the owner to reduce, if not eliminate, time without a vehicle which costs them money.

I'm a Doctor for peoples vehicles and it's my job to make recommendations to keep them healthy. It's also my job to deliver good and sometimes bad news, but provide a solution.

 

One thing about doctors is that they make a living off of whatever trade they practice. Mechanics are no different.

 

Sadly this is true. However, some of us choose the less profitable and more honest route. For me, the goal is to make sure my customer spends more time enjoying their vehicle and less time in my shop. Sometimes it means that they have to spend some money and be without their vehicle but when they get it back, they often go years and many miles before they have to come see me again. It's been that way for the last 10 years I've been doing this.

I've worked with people who did what was best for their pocketbook and not what was best for the customer. This is why I work alone and don't partner with anyone.

 

It's why I try to do most the pm/ repairs stuff myself and let the real knuckle busters handle the tasks I don't want to do.

 

There's nothing "wrong", or your not "wasting" $$$ by changing the oil ever 3,000 miles, "if", you use the cheapest oil that meets the specs required... BUT, if you use a full 100% synthetic that can cost 2X +the price but can last 2X +longer, and you are changing the oil every 3,000 miles... Then, yes, I would say you ARE changing the oil too soon, and wasting $$$... IMO and... the real downer is, you are NOT doing anything "better" for your engine... again JMO, but it's based on my oil analysis results at 10,000 mile oil change intervals...

 

Bing Videos 11,000 mile oil test results...

 

OP here, First off, I was mistaken as I am approaching 45,000 miles on the clock not 60. I think it would be wise to do an oil analyses just to be in the know. I put maybe 3,000 miles a year on my truck, should I stick to milage or time?? This summer I'll be replacing the trans pan and diff cover with ones that have plugs but have to suck the front diff and transfer case out. I have pretty thick skin and no offence was taken by any of the comments, I figure it's my truck I can change oil and filters whenever I want. My next deep dive will be into Amsoil, I'm sure there are past threads on this that I will find.

 

I am under the understanding that EVERY oil manufacturer, whether synthetic or regular oil advises/requires yearly oil changes regardless of how low the miles put on in a year is...

EDIT; In your case only driving 3,000 miles a year one could consider putting AmsOil in the engine a "waste", or not, depending on how much $$$ per oil change you want to spend... As to putting AmsOIL into everything else, that would certainly work...

 

This is a pretty heated subject........

Being a fleet operator, and years of experience with Fords doing extremely a lot of towing cross country.

6.7s are every 7500 rotella 15-40 Year-Round (55 gal drum oil), fuel filters every second, 15,000 MI

Transmissions, differentials transfer cases, every 100,000.

Generally speaking, SRW trucks tire rotation every 20,000, average replacement is at 60 to 70.

Batteries every 3 years, been switching over to agms and their lasting longer

Our dually trucks, painted rims. Get rotated every 15K,

The ones with aluminum rims, flip flop the front, nothing in the rear. Entire life is 50 to 70,000. The newer trucks, tire wears even better.

We do not run any additives in oil or fuel except anti-gel in the winter time.

In the 16 years that we've been running the 6.7s, can't think of a time where we've lost the transmission, we have lost to two cp4s in the last couple of years. One of them was due to a cracked transfer tank that filled with water. Another one we went out at 425,000, mi.

Our biggest problem is emissions, in particular idling. I have alerts set up for 15 minutes, unfortunately some of our guys have set up alarms on their phones so they shut the trucks off and then restart them. When I run my monthly report, I bust them. Issue we run into some of our trucks will sit for long periods of time, and then we'll have other issues such as turbo sticking and stuff.

 

All this is great info... BUT, have you ever picked out lets say 2 trucks out of the field of how ever many you have and... tried fully synthetic oils/fluids and doubled the recommended oil/fluid change intervals with using oil analysis, and see if there would be a difference in cost & downtime...???

 

No, not really. Once we got past the 6.0 and the 6.4 trucks, I've pretty much stayed true to what has been proven to work for us.

​​​​​​ We are starting the switch over to a leasing program, that will have a full maintenance package. (Not liking this, damn bean counters), we'll see what happens with that.

I treat my personal super duties the same, (except most deleted within 500mi) but then again I get rid of them after a year anyways. I've owned 19 Super Duty since 99.

I buy my oil in bulk drums, we use it across not only our vehicle but our equipment. Generators for example, we're doing an oil change every 250 hours /10 days, our newer tier 4 finals about every 20 days. We tend to go through a lot of oil.

 

I should add, we did lose one 6.7 engine as i think about it. One of our 24-ft box trucks was " losing" coolant. There was no visible leak, And it was losing coolant slowly over time.

It became progressively worse in a short period of time, while the truck was down in Texas on a project. There's only three places to coolant can go, a visible leak, through head gaskets into the oil, or out the exhaust pipe. Dpf will catch most residual smoke. It's normally associated with a antifreeze "smoke".

Drop it off at a Ford dealer, they probably should have declined it because they didn't deal with large trucks but anyways, they said it was XYZ. I said that didn't make sense but I'm not there. I have not seen the truck. I suspected it was the EGR.

Still no visible leak, oil black as it should be, so on my mind's eye it was being burned. They did the repairs, picked up the truck and drove about 700 mi back in Kansas City, motor failed about 10 mi from our office. The EGR cooler failed and allowed all the antifreeze to go out the exhaust.

Ford stepped up, they paid for the tow, and the replacement engine. I want to say the truck had about 60,000 mi on it. Same truck last week, I spent about $10,000, half of that was on emissions. Plugged up EGR from excessive idling (guess) Truck has approximately 205,000 mi on it, I had them do a full service oil, trans, rear end, the whole nine yards.



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