Dealing with sludge

who perished in the fatal kombi accidents that occurred recently.
It is very painful to lose family members due to avoidable circumstances. May the good Lord wipe away their tears and their souls rest in eternal peace.

We pursue the issue of sludge in our engines. Sludge accumulates over a long time and can only be picked when the engine is opened. The oil in the engine is “time sensitive or conscious” because it is manufactured to serve a specific purpose for a specific period.

Once the oil is stressed its useful lifespan will start to break down into a gel. This mud-like substance will begin to stick to moving parts in your engine.
Once this happens it affects all moving parts in terms of oil circulation and the engine will not cool as the cooling effects would have been tampered with due to non-circulation of oil.
The critical aspect is that as the gel settles it stores heat instead of providing a cooling effect.

Therefore, sludge is the thickening and breakdown of oil and as moisture and contaminants accumulates as sludge there is extreme wear as friction increases in moving. In most extreme cases this leads to engine failure.

Sludge starts at the valve cover area of the engine and the oil pan hence the sludge/gel blocks the oil screen siphon. If this happens the engine fails and the crank and camshaft would be damaged as the engine loses all pressure.

This is most prominent in cars made after 1997 to date. Our local situation is made worse because motorists are ignorantly buying sub-standard oil from the UAE that is being sold in spares shops.
We have talked about the quality of these oils after our visual and lab tests. Most of them do not meet the required specs and as such they are very dangerous to motor vehicles despite the fact that they are cheap.

We believe that marketing indeed has created this situation and has a pivotal role in the creation of the sludge.
Some oils will purport to reduce sludge by over 40 percent. This is because car manufacturers are heeding the need to adhere to emissions control and as such are now making cars with a lower viscosity engine oils that lessen sludge accumulation.

The other aspect could be a monograde oil plus cheap oil from UAE and low skilled or self-contractor mechanic plus low performance which will result in shorter engine lifespan.
We support the efforts by Toyota Zimbabwe on insisting that their customers use genuine parts on their vehicles. This must be applauded.