your oil will flow but its not very warm... it will do poor job of lubricating compared to warmed up oil. why does people use 5-30 mobile 1 instead of 10-30 when its cold if your theory is so true? because even synthetic oil is thicker when cold in the winter mornings... oh and lets mention your oil pump is stressed further if you dont let it warm up first because its trying to pump thicker oil... yeah extreme is bad, driving off right away or idling it too long. you talk of owning cars for 20 years and your engine never blew up... ofcourse, this is preventive measure, not a sure-fire way of keeping your engine healthy. just like how experts cannot prove 100% prove if synthetic prolongs engine life, there isn't a solid proof that warming your engine for 30 seconds compared to 2 minutes will destroy your engine... but if you truely care about the car like i do, you'd take every preventive measure like i do.. well atleast something this easy as waiting another minute.

 

Like I said in my original post, if you love your car as much as you say you do and you're truely concerned about engine wear during start up due to oil filter bypass and poor oil flow, buy an engine block heater. It will do far more to prevent engine wear than sitting in your driveway waiting for the engine to "warm up".

Peace out.

 

propellerhead, berkel, and puckadog are all correct and you should listen to them mifesto.

They are not saying to immediately drive your car upon start-up, but only after about 30 sec. to a minute of warm up time. The engine and the engine oil will heat up quicker with the car being driven than it will by just idling.

Also by idling the car for longer than a minute or so just wastes gas, and builds up carbon deposits on your valves.

Also the fuel is only very rich at start-up and once started it immediately runs very lean, at about 18-17 a/f until the cat warms up to operating temp.

I think that tech is talking out of his Let the car idle for 2 hours?.... yeah right

 

2 hours? that's ridiculous. I warm up my evo either for half a minute, OR temp needle at line C, OR until I am done shivering, OR until it reaches around 1400 rpm or lower.

 

Back to the real issue. The car didn't start in extremely cold weather, the plugs became wet fouled and continued starting attempts added raw gas, which slightly diluted the oil. Why didn't the car start? I've seen one other post with similar symptoms. The only think I can think of to help would be lighter weight oil during the winter and possibly having some spare plugs ready in a pinch.

 

Is your car modded at all? My car has seen several sub-zero mornings while parked outside (visiting family in way-north Minnesota) and has always started. On the worst morning my car started and died 3 times before it "caught" and stayed running on the 4th try; this was at 20K miles, right before an oil change and I need new plugs. Every other similiar morning it caught and ran on the first attempt.

My car is modded - I have a turbo-back exhaust and an XEDE; One of the reasons I went with a piggy back was so I could unplug it if sub-zero weather was a problem.

 

2 hours? who said 2 hours? heh... 30 seconds on a summer morning... maybe 2 or 3 minutes in a nasty winter morning

 

I remember reading or hearing something from one of the car "experts" which made a lot of sense to me. Running a cold engine with cold oil causes more wear than running a warm engine with warm oil. How do you warm the engine up faster to get the engine to stop wearing excessively? Drive it...

I had a similar experience to the original poster in my '94 RX-7. This was in the Los Angeles area -- cold temperatures were not a factor. I started the car, moved it about 50 feet and shut it off. The car wouldn't start again -- I took it to a local rotary engine guru who fixed the problem, and he told me never to do that again. He told me to always drive the car at least once around the block (I suppose you could also let it idle for a minute or two). Sounded to me like cheap insurance against another repeat of the problem...

 

Neither it's in cold or hot weather, I still wait for the temperature needle to come up before I drive. So whenever who wanna race, I can boooooosssstttt it up easy. Hehehe