More info from accross the pond.
FYI Castrol in Germany are the manf. of Ford Honey....
The manufacturer was Burmah-Castrol but I
guess that's now BP, who own it. The original product
was "BOT 130 M GETRIEBEOEL" but may be sold under the
Castrol name there as "SMX-S" gear oil. I couldn't
find it on the Castrol USA Website, so you may be out
of luck. That's the only approved product so no chance
of going elsewhere.
From two users of the lube in UK:-
After contacting Castrol in Germany (our neighbours..)
They gave me the advise to use Castrol SMX-S fully
synthetic gear oil. This combined with an additive
called TSL made my gearbox change gears like never
before.
For gear box: Castrol SMX-S Manual Transmission fluid.
No definite info on GL specs or so. The text on the
bottle says: specially
developed for gear boxes which require API GL-3 or -4
or engine oil...
A word from a lube supplier in USA:-
Castrol�® manufactured a synthetic transmission fluid
called TranSynd�® in conjunction with Allison�® to be
used in heavy-duty Allison�® transmissions. With the
introduction of this oil, Allison�® established the
Technical Engineering Specification-295 (TES-295), and
only operators using TES-295 oils can extend drain
intervals according to Allison�® recommendations in
bulletin 10-TR-99 Rev. B, and only those operators are
eligible to purchase the Allison�¨ extended
transmission coverage (ETC) warranty. Although
Castrol�® has since made that product available to
other marketers, manufacturers outside that limited
sphere are handcuffed. To achieve TES-295 is virtually
impossible because Allison�¨ has not made the TES-295
test stand available and has not established the
necessary formalized field trial protocol. Therefore,
AMSOIL performed a reverse engineering process on
TranSynd�® to uncover its chemical make-up, and then
formulated a product based on the same type of
chemical technology.
More info from a chemical/lube engineer:-
Lubricating oils should be carefully selected for
specific applications and not haphazardly applied. The
dominant wear mechanism and environmental contaminants
and hazards that are expected or known to occur in a
piece of equipment should be known and countered by an
effectively designed lubricant formulation including
base oil type, viscosity and additive package.
Heavily loaded components should be protected first by
viscosity if possible, and antiwear or mild to heavy
extreme pressure properties as needed. These additive
packages all protect equipment from rapid mechanical
wear at the cost of inducing some amount of chemical
wear, relative to the aggressiveness (strength) of the
antiscuff package. In lighter load situations, an
over-aggressive lubricant can shorten equipment life
through corrosive attack without providing any useful
benefit.
Note that some synthetic basestocks (such as diesters)
have some limited natural antiwear properties without
causing surface degradation, and that some lubricity
agents found in compounded oils are nonchemically
reactive.
Adam Davis, Noria Corporation
