SIZE Mini Cooper Club of Vancouver

"CAL" when I bring my MCS in next week for a oil change do they put synthetic in? I don't know what it actually came with (sorry for the noob question)

We ONLY Use 5W-30 Synthetic. Its labelled BMW High performance synthetic Motor Oil and is the recommended Oil. We have never used Mineral or Semi Synthetic. You have to use Syntheic on all the cars. ESPECIALLY turbo charged cars. Also The BG products work well with the BMW synthetic Motor oil (Oil Flush, additive and fuel treatment)
I have had customers try Redline, Royal Purple, Mobil 1 and Motul and NO one notices a difference and all say the BMW sythetic gives the smoothest Idle, smoothest operation and fuel economy for what its worth.

Good to know. Thanks!

Also, CAL uses a real MINI oil filter and remembers to put the O-ring on. Also replaces the oil drain plug as needed and other good stuff that other oil change places sometimes miss.

THanks Beken, Yeah we usually sell drain plugs on Inspections or when needed. Some shops or customers like to over tighten drain plugs and round them off a bit or damage the threads so changing the drain plugs on R50/R53 is recommended. We always change the cooper O Ring on all R56s everytime the oil is drained. And of course always OEM oil filters. We have a couple cars already over 250,000km which have been basically only dealer serviced and with the BMW high performance synthetic and the engines are strong, blow no smoke, full compression. And these are daily driven cars which are driven hard too. I use BMW synthetic oil too. Its the best ive of anything ive ever used

Did some work at MY for NgBlack...
promised him pics so I took a bunch for him of what I found. He said I should contribute them to the forum as well so her they are...
When I took off the valve cover everything looked well... top end was free of sludge/oil deposits... he had just changed the oil but nothing out of the ordinary
I already knew the head was coming off because of the carbon problem but this is a good example that even if the oil is changed in the factory timeline that N14s are still prone to carbon/sludge problems

This is with the cylinder head off... you get a good idea of the severity of the carbon. His car only has 45,000km on it. It did not set a check engine light but the carbon caused a restriction in the intake causing the boost to back up and pop the airbox to turbo inlet hose off.

Because the oil had been changed according to proper intervals you can see the pistons are pretty free of carbon and deposits. Also the carbon that was on the injectors was minimal and cleaned easily. You can also see the difference when the valves are clean opposed to when they are fouled with carbon. Quite a difference. And the valve faces are also now totally free of carbon and deposits. An easy clean up when the maintenance has been done

The Spark plugs also had some ash deposits on them. Have not seen ash deposits like this on an N14... Plugs were due for a change and were also 3 were coated in oil which because the valve cover was leaking. After the work was done NgBlack said the car ran a lot better.

Cal330ci wrote:...we usually sell drain plugs on Inspections or when needed. Some shops or customers like to over tighten drain plugs and round them off a bit or damage the threads so changing the drain plugs on R50/R53 is recommended.

Speaking of which, I noticed another oil drip the last while and took a peak under my car. I'm dripping oil out of the drain plug right now. Not enough to be a problem, but it's wet under there.