Not so sure how much has to be taken with a grain of salt because when I
bought my rebuilt engine from Boston Bob he said not to use synthetic
for the first 12,000 miles.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kim Brennan [mailto:KimBrennan@AOL.COM] 
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 12:38 AM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Re:       Syn oil in Converted S/A Inline 4

In a message dated 9/6/02 12:31:05 AM, mtbiker62@HOTMAIL.COM writes:

> The man who installed the "new, out of the box" engine, said that some

> synthetics can damage the seals, gasgets in the entine and create 
> leaks.
>
Grain of salt time.

Synthetics have a better wetting capability than dino oils. They also
clean an engine better (older ones especially) and reveal leaks that
were plugged with crud from the dino oils. On a new engine that is
properly torqued down, they shouldn't leak any more than regular dino
oil would. I switched my Tiico (2.0 liter inline 4 engine) on the
GoldBrick over to synthetic after 500 miles (the installer put in
regular dino oil, I switched after the "break-in"
(sic) period.)