Thanks for the info Bismic. I have really been looking at AMSOIL products and also an external filter kit. What is your impression of AMSOIL's 100% full synthetic 5w-30. Ford does not recommend. Of course.

 

11 engines and cumulated miles of 660,000 equals only 60,000 per engine. Data is certainly good to have, but the point is longevity, not just quantity. With or without additives, I would certainly hope you hadn't had injector problems in only 60,000 miles.

Fuel additives (and certainly by-pass oil filters) are obviously just like insurance. If everything goes well, you probably don't need them. Do they help w/ engines that you are hoping to get 200,000 + miles out of? Having seen several cases of severely contaminated fuel, I believe they can and do help.

My additive is $1.50 per 25 gal fill up (and thankfully my mpg is quite a bit more than 8). I fill up once a week (apprx). At most, the cost is $100.00 per year. Seems reasonable to me - but to each his own.

 

well.....im with you bismic, that is pretty much what I was trying to say! ya I spend a little extra on my rig.... so what in my opinion its well worth it. This is a public forum and we are all here to share info. thats what im doing, with every vehicle I have owned I have been meticulous with maint. and its probably over kill but so what I sleep good at night and have had very few problems with any vehicle I own! just my .02.

 

Origcharger with all due respect 660,000/11= 60,000 per truck. I see your point in the amount of fuel and maintance that you got to shell out. But if you break it down to per vehicle, you realy dont realy have any high milage on your rigs. You also state that you only have one 6.0. Dont the 6.0's have different fuel injectors then the 7.3's?

I dont mean to be rude, just wondering?

 

my bad !! I didnt see that bismic beat me to the math!

 

I agree with you cando the 6.0l is just a different animal from other diesels you just can not compare all things as if they are equal. Yes the injectors on the 6.0l are different from the 7.3.

 

Well one of them rigs has 1500 miles on it, another 15,000 and another 40,000, that puts the rest of them at between 80,000 and 135,000 miles including one 6.0 with 92,000.
Also at an average mpg of 8.0, we have pushed as much fuel through our injectors in 130,000 miles as an average pickup truck would in 260,000 miles.
Yes the 6.0s have differant injectors, but they are still HEUI and that article was published in 2000, several years before the 6.0 came out.

 

well Bismic I do believe that you have good reasons for saying what you do, however if fuel lubricity issues go back to at least the early 80's if not further, now if lubricity issues are So horrible how can we explain the millions of operators who are too stupid to know better, use no additive ever and have no problems. i do believe that if you have unusuall conditions an additive might benefit but from my 30 or so injector failures i would have to say clean filters would have saved a lot of them(my fault but i try to learn) to my understanding the only thing that cushions the injector pin at the end of the event is fuel,if there isn't any left over at the end of injection it bottoms out which looks alot like a lubricity failure, But lube failures(unless catastrophic) takes place over an extended time frame. a failure due to lack of pressure can happen very quickly, the results look very similar. as far as engine oil in cold climates does minus 30 degrees celsius regularily sound cold enough. I had an 82 trans am 5.0 v8 my usual oil was rotella t15w40 year round. I almost alway plugged in my block heater, but a few times over 7 or so years i got caught by surprise it started without a block heater at minus 30 or any other heater and no boost. yes it took 20 seconds for the pressure gage to move and 40 or more to hot full pressure. when i sold it I maybe added a half to one liter between changes. other than doing valve guides and seals the first month i had it the engine was never opened and never skipped a beat. those mornings i did let it warm up til it kind of limbered up. when i sold it after well over a 100000 miles i revved it to a good 6000 rpm told the customer if its gonna blow i still own it, ran like a charm. no i don't reccomend that you start that way all the time but if you just let it slow idle(don't rev it up for a good 5-10 minutes) it can be survivable

 

Some good points and certainly how much you think it helps is up to each persons to determine. The exhaustive study on lubricity we have all seen referenced here even indicates SOME additives actually do not help lubricity (but I say again, lubricity is only ONE reason for an additive). Lubricity is something measureable and my additives (Stanadyne and biodiesel together) have been shown to measureably help. Exactly how much they help inside the 6.0L fuel system is not that important to me since the TRUE cost per year to me is NO MORE than $100. People trying to learn from this thread do not need to be led to believe the cost is any more than that. Any help at all puts me closer to my goal - as many trouble free miles as possible.

My sons 7.3L (used to be mine) is over 200,000 and he adds no oil. Power and fuel economy are as good as when we got it at 60,000 miles. We both expect it to last 500,000 miles. My plans / desires are to try to get the same out of the 6.0L. Clearly from this site the 6.0L engines and their fuel systems have been shown to be very finnicky and quite a few folks are experiencing expensive problems. I am advocating conservatism - especially when the cost is small. I love this truck too much NOT to be conservative. That being said, my plans after warranty expires is to add a tuner, gages, studs, EGR and cooler delete, ITP, Fluidamnr, etc. I am in the camp that advocates all these mods will only make the truck MORE bullet proof.

I am really surprised at the staunch resistance from some to improving lubricity, but I understand that proving the bottom line result is hard if not impossible. The point of the post was to present the system design so that each person can use his/her logic to determine the best ways to maintain performance and reliability - and certainly "to each his own".

Origcharger has a good data point in that his truck has around 100,000 miles and no injector problems. I am glad to see results like this. A well made 6.0L is clearly "robust" enough to be run this far and farther without the fuel additives. My goal is quite a bit more mileage than this, so only time will tell. I would be very interested to see an oil analysis from origcharger to see if he has any higher than normal fuel dilution. Also, fuel additives are designed to help prevent EGR valve sticking (that so many have problems with). From my years on this forum, I believe a fuel additive is an ingredient to never having EGR problems also (another topic for a good debate).

Nitrogen, I definitely agree with you in that proper filters and change intervals are more important than an additive - UNLESS you get bad fuel. No one ever plans to get bad fuel, so being prepared for it is of importance to me. A post a long time ago on fuel indicated that Origcharger gets his fleet fuel directly from a distributor so his fillups do not need to be done at a regular gas station. If this is so, it is one more variable eliminated from the chain of things that can produce bad fuel. Is it a factor - who knows. I do know bad fuel happens WAY TOO OFTEN.

The MAIN (perhaps the only one in my opinion) point that I think is out there AGAINST a good fuel additive is this (and it certainly is not cost): When/IF you have significant fuel dilution, it seems some additives are actually detrimental to your lubrication system. This is why I also watch for fuel dilution (oil analysis). Below is a post (from a forum I forgot to bookmark - so I can not provide the reference link) that makes sense to me.

"This how it works on the 6.0L (if you have fuel dilution with a fuel additive in it). That additive is not designed for bearings. So it starts cleaning/wearing off the outer layer quicker. Some diesel Fuel additives can be worse than others. Stick with Diesel Treat 2000 that you are using or FP-60. Normally you will see an increase in copper and lead. Now the other thing that can cause that problem is turbo bearings. High lead and copper are solid indicators. Now these turbo bearings are also affected by fuel additives in the oil. My explanation stinks, but the gist of the problems caused by some fuel additives is solid. There are a couple of big name fuel additives that I will not put in my tank. In many instances, I can look at wear and tell if they are using one of about 5 additives. Not perfect, but very close. As always, I send my UOA to Dyson Analysis for his read to make sure on anything."

Hope this makes sense - it is late and I am watching tennis ............

Man I love watching the Australian Open LIVE and reading this Forum. Federer: 1 set up on Blake.

 

"I am really surprised at the staunch resistance from some to improving lubricity, but I understand that proving the bottom line result is hard if not impossible. The point of the post was to present the system design so that each person can use his/her logic to determine the best ways to maintain performance and reliability - and certainly "to each his own"."


The bottom line is I trust my fuel but not the additives as opposed to your point of view of trusting the additives and not your fuel.
We don't have EGR problems, our 6.0 engine has never had a wrench on it other than oil and filter changes.
Also we don't do used oil analysis, if you want, I could also run the numbers there to show how much we have saved by not.

I say if its working for you, keep on doing it.
Thats what I do.

 

good clean oil is the key

 

You bet, we drain the Rotella 5W-40 in our 6.0 every 7,500 miles and refill it with 15 fresh quarts.

If theres a diesel engine out there that likes dirty oil and dirty fuel I would like to know what it is?

 

I definitely agree 100% that bad or dirty fuel can happen I believe the best thing you can do for it is put in a fuel pressure gauge so you can see what pressure you have under load. no additive will keep dirt from plugging a set of filters. I had never heard about the concerns with additive contamination of lube oil(learn something new now and then)if your oil is that diluted just having that much fuel in it is going to make it much less slippery. no additive to my understanding can make bad fuel good, I mean the bad stuff is still there right? I guess what I've been trying to say is that it is absolutely critical that we do thorough failure analysis whenever a component fails prematurely. we have seen what these beasts are like, white smoke could mean injectors, next time it might be a sticky egr, maybe an IPR next time something else. yes we check for what failed last time but you have to keep an open mind. its not enough to just find the failed component and replace it we have to try to understand why it broke and if a repeat can be avoided.a good example is all the guys who have done headgaskets multiple times,yeah you saw coolant blowing out, maybe it was really due to the EGR cooler/ slash oil cooler issue. you could change head gaskets til the cow come home and never solve the problem, or change the EGR cooler and fix it for a while until the oil cooler killed that again. that s why understanding the root cause of a failure is so critical.even for Ford's engineers and all the mechanics out there it takes time to learn why X component is not living up to expectation, thats where the fun comes in having a first year engine or chassis nobody knows how the different components affect each other

 

trying to understand here if you use additive as preventitive in case of bad fuel, what are the symptoms you see? I hope I'm not coming over as some smartass who knows it all but the other thing is in 20 odd years of driving a heavy truck I can only remember 2 confirmed cases of truly bad fuel. one was summer fuel at minus 35 celsius, actually if you heated the filters to warm up the wax it had incredible power, and in the other case the filters had about a cup of water frozen in them and of course my 03 6.0 where I learned that it can hurt itself while still running, the old diesels could starve out with no harm at all

 

Maybe you could run the numbers for me on the savings for not carrying any life insurance and only liability car insurance as well. Many times I have emphasized to each his own - keep it professional. I was quite sure that you would not do oil analyses - your philosophy is consistent and it works for you. When you do run the numbers - do not over estimate the costs.

Another reason I periodically do new and used oil analyses is to obtain and share information here. Since there is so much on this site to "take away", it is just another way to contribute and it is pretty cheap entertainment. Who knows - maybe it will be of help to interested folks.