I continue to have excellent performance from SynLube lubricants. I've got about 32K miles and more than three years of service on the lubricant. Oil consumption during that time is about 4 oz. During normal commute type driving, it just doesn't burn much oil. I'm well over 100K per quart of oil at least.
I just recently rebuilt the CM oil filter. It looked completely new inside. There was no sludge or anything else. The filter media (8 micron efficiency) looked almost like it did when I installed it. It could have gone on for years but I was curious as to what was inside since quite a few people thought by now that it would have to have been clogged with deteriorated oil.
Of course gas mileage on the Ranger is pretty good and part of this must be due to the SynLube. My current 4-tank average is 20.3 MPG which is pretty good for a 4.0L V-6 Ranger w/4WD. The EPA weighted average for my mix of driving under the old, more optimistic EPA system is 16.1.
I've had the plugs out and they look great. I found, incidentally, that performance with NGK's V-Power plugs is much better than with their more expensive iridium plugs. They have a much lower level of resistance and don't misfire as much during cold damp weather. They've become my standard.
My commuting miles are way down because I came in one day and found I'd been transferred to first shift (Did they ask me? Of course not!) so now I'm taking public transportation three days a week. Consequently, I only drove 350 miles last month.
While my commute miles have gone down, my vacation miles will go up. I'm going up to Bar Harbor, ME and Bennington, VT so I will put about 3K miles on the Ranger for those trips. I would expect oil consumption to go up a bit with this type of driving but still to remain very low. I'll also get some experience with fuel consumption on a trip. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we won't get hit by a Cat 5 hurricane that will cause gas prices to shoot up.
This year is the first year I've got to get an emissions inspection. I looking forward to the numbers I get there. I'm expecting to see some good results. I'll post them when I get them. This should be another indication of my engine's health.
I'm toying with the idea of adding a PCV filter to my engine. I just had a discussion with someone on AtlantaGasPrices.com who told me that he'd been surprised at the amount of crankcase emissions he was seeing. Normally this stuff is fed right back into the engine to reduce emissions but it is better to trap this stuff and dispose of it in other ways. My attraction to it is that it will be enother indication of how effectively the SynLube is holding up and how effectively the ring seal is. Since I'm a bit lazy and not especially mechanically inclined, I've been looking for one of these on the market but the only one I've found costs $179. The person I discussed this with fabricated his own for $30.
After 32K miles and over three years of operation, the evidence is mounting that SynLube works.