Looking for advice on maintenace and care of a diesel BF

[whemme]

Not to cloud the synthetic vs petroleum oil issue too much further, but here is some info from Aviation Consumer magazine some time ago about the comparative issues on using petroleum based vs synthetic oils in piston aircraft engines.

The one downside to synthetic oils was that for engines that were not started and run at least once every 10 days or so, they determined that synthetic oils did not keep the internal engine parts coated with oil after this period of time because synthetic oils would completely 'drain off' of those metal parts after that time period and rust or corrosion would then set in. This drain off characteristic of synthetics is much less of a problem with pertroleum based oils.

So their recommendation for piston aircraft engines was that is was OK to use synthetic oils and gain some of their benefits as long as the engine was run frequently with no periods of non-operation exceeding 10 days.

I see a parallel to the engines in our motorcoaches. These engines typically might sit unused for weeks at a time when not on the road. You normally run you car engine typically every day - but not your motorhome engine. Based on this, I have chosen to use petroleum based oil in my BF.