Why not use a clean rag or paper towel to swipe clean the dip stick?I find it's a little tricky to use the dipstick when adding oil because the dipstick tube gets oil on the dipstick as it is inserted...
IMHO, you'd be well advised to quit 'treating' your oil with anything. Today's oil doesn't need any help from additives of any sort.
Crankcase oil capacities are listed in volume ounces, not weight. A quart of oil is 32 ounces by volume but does not weigh two pounds. Use the dipstick to fill your crankcase to capacity.
Start over with oil (no extra additives) and a good oil filter. You may have gotten a counterfeit filter if you bought it off the internet.
Yes, it's in there.Thanks, guys. I do know about the rag thing. Maybe my dipstick tube is skinnier than most? Actually I'm getting better at reading the dipstick, I found that I have to hold it right in order to keep one side of it clean as it goes in.
I'm interested in your knowledge about oil additives. Probably a large topic meant for another thread. Do you mean to say that they put stuff in there that actually cleans carbon deposits from your engine in the same way as SeaFoam? I'll totally buy that Restore is a crock.
Go to pure-gas.org and search your state. I count no fewer than 20 stations in CT that sell non-ethanol gas; if you live near a border, search the adjoining state, too.Can't put oil in your gas though. Where I live, you can't get ethanol-free gas, so the SeaFoam is supposed to not only clean fuel injectors, but also absorb ethanol and also water... or something. Makes your gas better I guess.
Nothing you can spray in the carburetor throat is going to 'clean out the carburetor.' It never reaches the parts of the carburetor which may actually need cleaning. FWIW, water will clean carbon off the tops of pistons.There's an aerosol version that you spray directly into your choke, which is meant to clean out the carburetor and also the tops of the pistons. There's videos of the stuff in action, it really does seem to work. What's wrong with that?
No. Sludge has a thick, viscous, gooey yet slippery feel, too, but is the very thing you DON'T want in your engine.And, about Restore (or similar). Let's say you have an old engine. Don't they get grooves in the cylinders, not to mention general wear? I know the best thing is to take it all apart, hone it, and put in bigger rings, and in extreme cases, replace the pistons with bigger ones, right? But this is a huge amount of work and beyond the skills of most. A super-thick, viscous, yet also slick (like slug slime, if you've ever picked one up and found it hard to wash the slime off!) coating material might actually fill some of the grooves and give the motor some compression. Much easier to treat the oil every so often than tear apart your whole motor. The Restore looked different than oil when I poured it in. It was gooey yet slippery. As a cure for poor compression, I agree that it is a half-measure. But a half-measure is better than no measure, right?