TECH: LUBRICATION KEEP YOUR MOTOR RUNNING
Proper lubrication is essential to the functioning of your engine. A dead battery will stop it temporarily, but a lack of lubrication will rapidly become terminal. As with all technological advances, modern oils are very different from what your engine may have used when it was new.
The most common lubrication used in vehicles is mineral oil, created over millions of years from dead sea creatures and extracted by drilling. As it comes from the ground, it is a mixture of molecules of varying lengths which are sorted by fractional distillation. Among the shortest are petrol molecules, with lubricating oils in the middle and tar the longest.
The most basic property of oil is its viscosity. Obtaining oil of a particular viscosity is done by selecting molecules of the right length, with the value being described by the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) number. Viscosity is measured by the number of seconds it takes
