How to Torque your Engine

Publisher's Note: Welcome to our ninth edition of Tech Tips Tuesday on "How to Torque your Engine".  We'll be re-publishing an edition of AMSOIL Tech Tips for you every Tuesday.  Click on the Blog Category "Tuesday Tech Tips" to see everything published to-date.

John Gardner: And this is the AMSOIL Tech Tip. It's all about torquing, my friend. Manufacturers have made engine tolerances tighter through the years to harness all that horsepower and combustion pressure. So, it's important that you torque an engine right. How do you do it? Well, take a look at this graphic right here. This is a cylinder head, and if you're doing a cylinder head, you can see there's a sequence to doing it: one, two, three, four, and work your way out. If you don't have that, it's just common practice, basically, to start in the middle and work your way out. But if you have the manufacturer's specifications, follow the sequence.

Now, importantly, look down there: 22 foot-pounds, and then it wants 90 degrees, and 60 degrees or 70 degrees or 30 degrees, whatever it may be. That's the trick, my friends. And I have a degree set up right here so we can go ahead and look how to do it. This is actually a torque wrench. Now, on a torque wrench, you went to the specific degrees you needed to go at. And then what I did, I put it over here, and I'm going to set this up to zero right here. And when I set it up to zero, now I'm pulling that. This is the crankshaft bolts down here, and I'm pulling it. And as I pull it, I can go 30, 40, 50, or whatever the manufacturer calls for. That's key.

Now, that's key because the oil has to fill all those bearings. And that's a problem, because one oil doesn't fit all.

Len Groom: It doesn't, not anymore with what you were just talking about with all these different torque specs and the different tolerances inside these engines. It does require different oil because the spaces are different, and oil flow rates and pressures and temperatures all play into it as well.

What does that mean for us? It means we have to have a wide variety of products, which we do. Our Signature Series line covers everything from a 0W-16, to be honest with you, all the way up to the 5W-50. So, we've got a large range of products to suit all of those different manufacturer specifications.

John Gardner: Now, Lynn, this also talks a little bit about it. This is pretty cool, this is on your website. And this is an industry standard, but you guys go way better than that.

Len Groom: Right. This speaks to the construction of the actual product. So once again, the Signature Series products are not built with industry standards in mind. Industry standards would be, 'What do I need to get a D minus in this class?' What we've done here is the product itself has been built to outperform the industry standard. In this particular sequence for A test, the lower the numbers, the better. They allow a 90, we actually come in at a 20.2. So what that means is we did better than what was required. So, it goes to build quality.