Hammer Time: What's In Your Oil?

Two hundred thousand miles.

It’s a beautiful moment for many a car owner.

As for me? Well, I admit that I cheated when I saw that number flash by in my wife’s car back in March. Like many an enthusiast, I had bought it used and was planning on keeping her daily driver for the long haul.

The question for me was, “How long would the long haul be?” Since I buy, fix and sell a lot of vehicles, and have deeply imbibed the fluids of wisdom at the Bob Is The Oil Guy web site, I decided to live my life on the wild side.

I performed an oil analysis.

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Piston Slap: The Cavalier's Not-So-Silent Ricochet

TTAC Commentator Silent Ricochet writes:

Hey Sajeev, it’s been a long time since I sent my first email about my 2002 Cavalier Z24 making rattling noises at low RPM. The noise has since then gotten slightly more noticeable and I finally decided to take some action and really look into it. As a quick refresher, in First and Second gear, between 1500 and 2000RPM under moderate throttle, the car will make an awful rattling noise, like that of pennies in a coffee can kind of noise.

After looking at several cavalier and J-Body forums I stumbled upon a ridiculously popular thread that contained all the information I would ever need…

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  • MrIcky The ranger raptor is just simply better if you actually want to go off road, and it's only 60% of the price.
  • FreedMike Just the thing for big city driving! It's easy to park, easy on gas, and there's nothing like unleashing the 700 hp beast in bumper to bumper traffic on the Dan Ryan. (Seriously, I'm finding it almost depressing to own a performance car in a place where you can use its' performance maybe 10% of the time.)
  • Kjhkjlhkjhkljh kljhjkhjklhkjh at least they got rid of that awful 3.5 .. still not buying domestics
  • Zerofoo NASA figured out years ago that astronauts needed to be fully-engaged in piloting spacecraft or not at all. Systems that required occasional monitoring and inputs caused astronauts to lose focus.
  • Fahrvergnugen Too bad most new vehicles don't come already equipped with the one option that actually makes a difference in collision avoidance.A human brain.