Oil Temperatures

[krawn]

Hi All,

I was just wondering what sort of oil temperature your turbo charged BMW's should run at when idling at operating temperature? Mainly because my BMW used to sit at about 80 degrees C constantly, even when creeping along in heavy traffic it only used to reached 85C max, but now, after I had a little play round with my Oil Temp/Pressure gauge, the needle tends to creep up to 90 degrees quite easily when sat in traffic, even got up to 93 when I left her idling when parked up.

Just wondering if the higher the oil temp, am I likely to damage the engine in any way? Strange thing is the water temp is sat at 72 most of the time unless I'm really driving it hard. She cools back down to 80 when I cruising along, the oil cooler is sat in the airflow, so I guess this helps things along.

Any thoughs or insights appreciated.
Kam
1982 E21 323efi Turbo (UK Spec)

[krawn]

Kam
1982 E21 323efi Turbo (UK Spec)

[Jeremy (the original)]

If you were getting up into the 110-120 range you might have cause for concern. If you're using a quality sythetic of some kind (you are, aren't you?), the oil should be able to withstand those temperature easily.

Jeremy

[krawn]

Thanks for the advice Jeremy. Yes, to answer your question, I'm using 15w40 (as recommended by the guy who built my engine and did the efi conversion) Castrol GTX Magnatec Semi-Synthetic oil. Best stuff I can get here, I'd like to run Mobil1, but this only comes in 10w40. Got my new gauges for oil pressure and temp which should be arriving today, so I'm gonna have a look and see how the temps go with those.Kam
1982 E21 323efi Turbo (UK Spec)

[claylake]

'88 Dinan turbo M6
'90 325iCA
'90 325iS
'04 325i
'78 R100S