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RE: [VintageLambo] Re: winter idling

Robinson, Aaron

My feeling is don"t start the car unless you can drive it, or start it once every couple of months and let it run for quite a while until oil and water are up to temps. I doubt that the wear and tear of weekly cold-starts and resulting condensation from prolonged idling is offset by whatever benefit is achieved by moving oil around. Engines don"t like to sit for long periods, but sitting for a couple of months is far preferable to repeated cold starts. Indeed, the real concern isn"t oil circulation. The engine in my "38 Buick hasn"t run for over a year and the lifters and bearing surfaces were all dripping with a thick layer of oil when I took it apart last week. The real concern is coolant. A while back one of our editors spoke to David Turcotte, technical director for Zerex. They figure you have to heat and circulate coolant at least once every 30 days to ensure corrosion in all the little nooks and crannies doesn"t overwhelm the additives in the stagnant coolant. By circulating it you replace the stagnant stuff with fresher coolant from somewhere else. Of course, those calculations are conservative, assuming the coolant is anywhere in its natural lifespan (one to five years in some cases) and assuming the water mix has a "reasonable" amount of hardness and chlorides found in tap water which aid corrosion. If you use distilled water and change the coolant every two years, you are well inside the conservative parameters. Thus, I do only one or two starts during the winter at most and try to shoot for dry days when the car can actually turn its wheels. AR -----Original Message----- From: lamboguy [mailto:lambojambo@aol.com] Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2002 1:20 PM To: VintageLambo@yahoogroups.com Subject: [VintageLambo] Re: winter idling --- In VintageLambo@yahoogroups.com, "drakepeterdrake " wrote: > When the roads are snow and/or salt covered, and my car can"t be > driven for a month or 2, is there any value to starting it up once a > week, letting it reach full temperature, pumping the brakes a few > times, etc.?And yes, I will leave the garage door open... Pe Oh yeah!It"d be better if you were able to drive it around until it reached full operating temp to burn off various deposits, for example, in the exhaust. But I"m a firm believer in starting the motor every few weeks when not using the car.Maybe you could even back out/back in.There are so many shafts in a car that need to turn to a new position occasionally, and seals for those shafts that need fresh lubrication and shaft movement, etc.(Hit all the zerk fittings too...) The way I always look at it, is that every part on a car is designed for a running car.That engineer has done all the hard work, now all we need to do is run the car occasionally to move things around and lubricate. As for backing out/back in, that would help the tires too, if you can sort of reposition them. Now, there are proper ways to store a non-running car, but I don"t believe that"s the question here because I"m assuming you"re going to be driving again once the days clear up. I"ve had long periods of "non-driving" over the 20 years I"ve owned my car, and that"s how I"ve dealt with it, with no obvious problems. Interested to see other opinions on all this. Best, Fred