To simply say that stories of good engines going bad from detergent oil are "myths" is itself a myth.
There certainly have been situations where an engine ran pretty good until someone dumped high degerent oil in. Then it starting using oil so bad, it had to be torn down and rebuilt.
I've seen it happen several times. Our shop had to pay to fix a few. Does that mean HD oil ruined an old but good engine? Well it depends on your defintion of the words like like "ruin" and "good."
At the last tractor/diesel shop I worked at - we had a standard policy. If we had no maintenance history on an old tractor, it got non-detergent oil. We also kept two types of degergent oil around. Quaker State HDX was a "medium" detergent oil and Deere TorqueGard was "high." We made that determiniation ourselves from witnessing how fast some dirty engine started losing sludge.
What I've seen several times with cars and tractors is this. And old but good running engine gets an oil change with HD oil. And, it's a mess inside. Gobs of sludge and deposits all over the place, internally. Also probably lots of engine wear and sludge on pistons and ring-lands. Then all gets knocked loose, and the engine becomes an oil-burner.
Those that say this is all a myth, I assume, never worked on tractors and old cars back in the 60s-70s.
As to the history of degergent oil? I'm no expert, but I do know what high degergent motor oil was availble in Europe around 1940. I also know that USA production saw a huge surge during World War II, especially for use with diesel engines that had problems with sticking piston rings. Also, in the USA, when the API rating changed from SA to SB, some oils had some degergents added. That was the middle 1930s. The key thing is - when did companies that made cars and trucks insist on a certain level to honor warrantees? That I don't know. Probably 1964 when API SC rated oil became available. Previous to that, some SB oils had detergency, and some did not.
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