Engine and hydraulic oil additives

I would be very cautious in adding additives to oil, yes there are some additives out there that are designed to have a purpose such as GM cam and lifter additive for the older flat tappet cams as newer oils are marginal for having enough zinc so that is one example. However there are so many snake oils out there and its hard to know what has a proper purpose and what ones are just being flogged to make money at the cost of harming the engine. For instance and am going on information from years back with products like Power Up that claimed big things and they contained PTFE which is Teflon. So it was said in one example that a Hutterite colony had used it in some diesel engines and they had bearings go out and I don't know the amount of carnage that was done but I doubt it would have been pretty. This was after I had heard about that and had gone to an oil seminar that a rep from Petro Canada had put on at the College in Fairview and while he may have some bias because of working for a particular oil company, his stance was that by and large oils are designed to be used as they are formulated and not to be thinking that something needs to be added after the fact. Also it was him who claimed that the teflon in an engine application would break down over time due to the environment in an engine and turn into something along the lines of sulphuric acid and eat the bearing coatings. He also pointed to oil thickeners or oils that they put that paratac or similar idea of a substance into which coat the gears so nicely on the little hand crank demo of the gears inside of a clear plastic display you will see at trade shows and I've mentioned this before. He said that while lubrication is part of an oils job, its also its job to wash away contaminants as well as carry heat away from the gears in a transmission or differential. He claimed that what will happen is that the stickiness of that product will cause wear metals to stay put on the gear teeth and turn into a grinding compound to wear at the gears rather then a normal gear oil that will wash down the gears constantly taking away the wear metals ( and hopefully stick to the magnet or be caught in a filter ) . Also the tacky thick oil would give an almost blanket type effect in insulating the gears from cooling properly so end up heating up the gears and destroying them. Obviously if there are syncro units, that will be bad news with an additive that would alter the characteristics of the oil, just like the EP additive in GL5 gear oil causes damage to the syncro units in some transmissions.

Be vary wary of these miracle oil additives that claim the world and are flogged at trade shows and they have their friction test stand and so on, and some are sold like Amway on a pyramid scheme type sales structure.

That is why I tend to lean to full synthetics, the higher heat they can withstand before breaking down prematurely, and to lubricate critical components on startup in cold weather, be that the engine, trans diffs etc.