Thought synthetic oil was a scam for years until my old Civic hit 280k
Honestly I used to think synthetic oil was just a way for stores to charge double, so I ran whatever conventional stuff was on sale in my 98 Civic for a long time. Ngl a retired mechanic at a Cars and Coffee in Denver laughed at me and told me to actually look at my valve cover after two oil changes on each type. When I finally popped it at 240k, the conventional side had that brown varnish all over it and the synthetic side looked almost new, which kind of blew my mind. I'm not saying it fixes everything, but I switched both my cars over after that and my compression numbers held steady for another 40k miles. Anyone else got a real side by side story like that, or was my Civic just weird?
Guess that retired mechanic at Cars and Coffee did you a real favor, huh, most people just get a lecture about their lawn mower and move on. The varnish thing is real though, my uncle pulled his valve cover at 200k on conventional and it looked like somebody poured BBQ sauce in there. Synthetic just holds up better when things get hot, that's the whole deal. Your Civic wasn't weird, it was just honest with you.