1985-1998 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
Well, I did say I wasn't "bashing" this product and that I wasn't claiming that it will damage any 9000 cooling system. My point is that you claim that Bar's Leaks is good stuff because you put it in the cooling systems of all your cars (and otherwise maintained their cooling systems fastidiously) and after a large mileage, nothing bad happened - I have done the same, with the exception of adding Bar's Leaks and have also had nothing bad happen after extended mileages (the 5 9000s I have owned have covered almost 700K miles between them during their lives). According to scientific method, that makes your experience inconclusive.
I also said that what I read "suggested" that Jaguar no longer recommend BL (I also said in my post to Tom that it wasn't authoritative). I cannot claim it to be true based only on what I have read, but since it calls into question one of major marketing claims in support of BL, I feel it warrants further investigation. Many thanks for your offer to undertake some of this investigation. I think perhaps I sidetracked the thread by quoting the URLs I found, giving the impression that I agreed with the opinions expressed within or that I was using them to back up an argument that Bar's Leaks damages engines. You told me (well, John, actually) to search and I did, and that was what I found. If you didn't expect me to find a reference to GM using Bar's Leaks in their cars, I'm not sure what else you expected me to find. However, it did seem to suggest that Bar's claim that Jaguar use and recommend their product is outdated, and I wanted to know whether this was really the case.
Some of the text you only partially quoted concerned why Bar's Leaks might have caused radiator blockage in Jaguar applications ("Australian" language censored):
"In theory, Bar's Leaks is a useful product, but it requires the user to add it slowly to circulating hot water, so it can go into solution. In the V12, coolant is added to the header tank, which is out of the flow and remains relatively cool. So the rats**t-like pellets sit in the bottom of the header tank and whenever the system draws water from the tank, some pellets dribble out and go straight into the bottom part of the radiator, where they partly dissolve and glue together into a hard cake."
Yes, I believe it was the pelletted variety. This does sound as if the Jaguar engineers might have made a mistake. However, I'm not assuming that is the case, as I don't have the evidence. I too saw a reference to a 1990 XJS handbook that mentioned using Bar's Leaks (and gave the Jaguar part number). I think it might have been in a PDF I downloaded from jag-lovers.org.
It is interesting that you say that you are in the advertising business. I am an engineer and perhaps that might explain our different approaches to the subject. Engineers, in large part anyway, deal with absolutes. Opinions are no good in engineering until backed up with facts, except as an incentive to find those facts. So far as I know (please correct me if I have got it wrong), advertising is concerned with persuasion. Many people are just as easily persuaded by opinion as by fact, especially if the opinion sounds like fact or is presented as authoritative. Most of them are not engineers or scientists and are not trained to look for hard facts.
The only reason I have decided to take part in this debate is because I continually see people here advocating the use of Bar's Leaks to others as a "preventative" measure without any evidence that it provides any benefit. If I have prompted someone to find and present the real facts that support the use of Bar's Leaks as a cooling system conditioner, then that's fine. As I say, as an engineer I just want the facts rather than someone's opinion. At work, I am proved wrong every day (several times on a bad day), but that's my job and it's fine with me. I argue with facts and someone comes up with a factual argument (often with information I didn't know) that proves my argument wrong. However, neither I nor my colleagues would expect to win a technical argument without having facts to back up our side of the argument. We leave the "woolly" arguments to management and marketing people.
And in reference to the above about engineers making mistakes - we do. I'm also ashamed to admit that I have sometimes been forced by management (and marketing people) to make decisions against my better technical judgement, often to achieve short-term goals. I'm not saying that this was the case with the Jaguar engineers (again, I can't judge without the facts), but if they did make a mistake, it wasn't necessarily because they were incompetent (they clearly weren't).
I'm not deciding "against" Bar's Leaks on the basis of hearsay. Rather I'm deferring the decision to depart from what Saab recommend until I have facts to show that someone else knows a better way. And Bar's Leaks only has a historical record "longer" than many other products, not necessarily "better".
posted by 62.253....
, Sun, 25 Aug 2002 13:26:13, Sun, 25 Aug 2002 23:46:17
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