Speaking of pressure vs flow, I remember hearing that in the 70's, Alfa
Romeo had big warnings in their owner's manuals about not exceeding
2000 rpm until the oil pressure came down off the peg at idle -- seems
that oil in those days was viscous enough at low temperature that there
was essentially no flow to the cams until the engine warmed up, and if
you ran the revs up to 6000 cold the cam lobes wore off pretty
fast.....
Gasoline dilution of the oil isn't a problem any more unless you have a
pressure regulator fail and dump fuel into the oil. A leaking float
valve on a carb, however, can do nasty things to an engine -- a friend
on mine bought a work van, a mid 70's Dodge, with a two barrel carb.
It flooded all the time, so he asked us to fix the carb -- sure enough,
when you started it, fuel was running out the emulsion tube intakes and
down the throat. Easy rebuild, but when we got it running it only had
5 psi oil pressure, went up to mabe 15 at speed -- 8 qts of "oil" in a
6 qt pan, at least half a gallon of gasoline in there. Luckily it
didn't explode before we got the oil out.
Peter
