Nice site Monte. Oil and lubrication is a hell of a deep subject. Even the range of grease types available is just scary.
I remember attending a course on lubrication many many many moons ago "Tribology" the science of lubricanting moving surfaces from the Greek word to "Rub" but thats about all I can remember. These heavy weight oil guys are into taking samples for wear analysis which is only viable where large volumes of oil are in use.
Here's one thing I learnt about oil. We used to run a pair of 1.4MW gas turbine generator sets at work. One Friday when a couple of us had just arrived at the pub for our "Friday Lunch" we got a call to say one of the turbines had just gone bang ! [smiley=flamethrowingsmiley.gif]
To cut a long story short the failure was due to the air intake sucking in oil fumes with excess sulphur content. It sure spoilt our lunch.