Hi J,

I don't hate people in a debate.

I'm a bit confused by your friend's post. A quart of oil is a bunch of mineral or synthetic base stock plus additives. The base stock is typically about 85% of the quart. He seems to be saying the additives are 99% of the quart; of course this is incorrect. There's obviously some mis-communication here, as your friend is obviously no dummy.

I wrote the thing about 37wt, which I came up with by interpolation. I'm well aware that viscosity is measured in Stokes or Pascals, it even says so in my article. I'm also aware that weights refer to a range, there's a table in my article. Curiously, these days we see a lot of oils rated as 0w and 5w, but I'm completely unable to find a specification for these viscosity ranges. I've been presuming that there is no agreement on a spec yet, and individual companies are simply making up the ratings, again by extrapolation. If they can, I don't see why I can't.

The API (American Petroleum Institute) says the 10W portion refers to the viscosity at 32 degrees farenheit, I'm simply quoting them. It's clear to me that a lot of smaller companies make up much of their data as they go - just last year the API sued two companies for putting the API seal on their oils without API testing or the API contract.

I'm not an oil engineer nor a chemical engineer, and I've no doubt I have much yet to learn about oils. If your friend would choose to correspond with me, I'm sure I would learn something and improve my article. However, the response you quoted above which was made after skimming, not reading my article is not all that helpful to me.