| Merian |
Sun Aug 09, 2015 5:13 pm |
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While some drive their Vanagon dialy, many (like me) use it almost solely for camping. That means that the standard mileage-based maintenance intervals may not be suitable, and things should instead be renewed after a certain number of years no matter what the mileage.
The obvious #1 time based maintenance task is to flush out and replace the brake fluid with new fluid from a sealed container every 2-3 years (as it absorbs water from the water vapor (humidity) in the air, lowering the boiling point and destroying braking effectiveness.
But what about CV joint grease?
Maintenance intervals for CV joint grease are often listed as 50,000 to 100,000 miles for a variety of cars, and the main concern seems to be impact damage to the rubber boots, allowing grit to enter. (On a VW, the major concern is the crappy boots falling apart even with no impacts).
VW doesn't seem to have a spec. for time, only mileage.
One approach to low use vehicles might be to use the shelf life given by the manf. of the grease as a proxy for low use. I can think of a couple of reasons why it might be lower or higher than that tho.
Swepco's Senior Scientist responded to my question about shelf life as follows: "If SWEPCO 101 Moly grease is stored out of the weather in a closed container it should be good for 5+ years. If you provide us with the batch numbers on the container we can tell you when the product was manufactured. The batch number is 4 numbers and 3 letters, for example 4325NAC."
Mobil told me 3 years for their Delvac™ Xtreme Grease.
Another way to estimate the time you can wait is to look at that 50k to 100k mileage interval and divide by a typical yearly mileage.
And here is some fun reading:
https://www.stle.org/assets/document/Grease_Degradation_in_Constant_Velocity_(CV)_Joints.pdf |
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