Oil INSTEAD of water in a car radiator!!!

[Ah-Those-Old-Days!]

Just for FUN, I like watching the various antics that a Russian Youtube channel posts, called "Garage 54".
However, recently, one of their posts actually sounds/seems quite feasible and practical!!, using oil instead of water in the radiator!!
In fact they took it a few steps further than that... Firstly, an explanation in that regard...

Often when a head-gasket fails between a water port, and an oil port, (not talking about the cylinders here), there are two ways for this.
One path, is from the water to the low pressure return oil path, where water gets into the oil sump, and makes an emulsion. The OTHER
path is from the high pressure oil input to the Head into a water port, forcing oil into the radiator system. Again, not talking about pistons!

OK, so they took the head off, and cut channels through BOTH those above regions in the Head-Gasket!! And filled the radiator/cooling
system with the same oil type as the engine sump. And it all runs fine, and with many benefits!! Why?...

1- There's a connection between the two systems.
2- The pressure is balanced between the two systems.
3- No need for a pressurized radiator cap!! (As the old 'pressure' was only to increase the water 'Boiling-Point' which is not a problem now!)
4- There is NOW no corrosion due to water, within the Head, 'Water'-pump, Radiator etc.
5- No 'freezing' of 'water' in an engine in such colder climates!
6- Probably many other things too I can't think of!! haha.

Does this all sound too good to be true, or am I missing something!!!??? Progress through to the latter parts of the Video...

[shred]

I wouldn’t like to try it with a modern VW, where the water pump impellor is made from plastic.

[lsemmens]

It does sound too good to be true to me, however, it does seem to work.

[fromaron]

Does this all sound too good to be true, or am I missing something!!!??? Progress through to the latter parts of the Video...

Couple of things to consider:
1. Radiator has been designed for certain type of coolant liquid to deal with engine heat.
2. Oil has different heat dissipation to the automotive coolant liquid so worse radiator performance can be expected.
3. Driving the old "Lada" car in Russian winter without bonnet lid will surely provide plenty of freezing ventilation air for the engine leaving just a fraction to radiator to handle. Try the same during summer.
4. Don't do it unless you keep the car for occasional drive to amuse your mates.

[wotnot]

Does this all sound too good to be true, or am I missing something!!!???

What you are missing, is reading the results that appear when you search for the string 'engine damage caused by water in oil' ; once you've done that, you might see how this post perhaps belongs in the Jokes or youtube clips section of this forum.

We can chat about the thermal conductivity of the fluids, or their specific heat capacity and lubricity factors, but in view of what happens to an engine with water in the oil ...(read search results above)...all we'd actually be doing, is technically explaining why that engine failed in very short time ....(something they learnt long ago with steam engines, before the internal combustion engine was invented).

This...is silly...but that's what Garage64 are all about -- doing silly things with cars, as a source of entertainment/fun.

edit: replacing the water with oil is a joke btw -- given the thermal conductivity/specific heat capacity of oil versus water, explains why they use water instead of oil for this purpose - it's called 'science'...and that's before even thinking about the various mechanical interactions -- not least of which being the parasitic looses at the coolant pump (water is easier than oil to pump), the size of the system (oil is only about 20% as efficient compared to water wrt moving heat from one place to another) and like formaron points out, you need bigger, plate style radiators (instead of tube types found in vehicles...and it goes on and on and on....

[Ah-Those-Old-Days!]

What you are missing, is reading the results that appear when you c ; once you've done that, you might see how this post perhaps belongs in the Jokes or youtube clips section of this forum.

We can chat about the thermal conductivity of the fluids, or their specific heat capacity and lubricity factors, but in view of what happens to an engine with water in the oil ...(read search results above)...all we'd actually be doing, is technically explaining why that engine failed in very short time ....(something they learnt long ago with steam engines, before the internal combustion engine was invented).

This...is silly...but that's what Garage64 are all about -- doing silly things with cars, as a source of entertainment/fun.

WELL!!... (OP here...) I FULLY understand the 'silliness' surrounding 'Garage-54', and that is what I liked hahaha... However, I was SURPRISED by what was said above?????
"Water mixed with oil", not to mention the "but in view of what happens to an engine with water in the oil ".... Aargghh, did you actually READ my POST!!!

You obviously didn't, but that's OK. To all others though, I love the often "tongue in cheek" stuff that they do, but I still really think that what they are proposing
is NOT too weird and will actually work. OK, I would not try this on a modern engine, but it WOULD be fun to try on something old, just for fun!!
Apart from what I said originally, there is no 'pressurized' system for hoses/pipes, not to mention that there is the added volume/capacity (sump) for cooling!

[wotnot]

but I still really think that what they are proposing is NOT too weird and will actually work. OK, I would not try this on a modern engine, but it WOULD be fun to try on something old, just for fun!!
Apart from what I said originally, there is no 'pressurized' system for hoses/pipes, not to mention that there is the added volume/capacity (sump) for cooling!

LOL!!... the best example of the Dunning-Kruger effect I've seen this year in this forum =)

More than a century of development and design improvement by engineers, since the invention of the internal combustion engine, and not once has there been a cooling system that uses oil instead of water to remove waste heat from IC engines -- it's no accident, coincidence, or like that because some engineer never thought about it ; they use air or water for wholly substantiated engineering/scientific reasons.

No slight intended, but, the fact you really think it would work, puts you right up there with the Flat Earth theory believers B^)

edit: actually, wikipedia has a pretty good treatise on this ;

"However, properties of the coolant (water, oil, or air) also affect cooling. As example, comparing water and oil as coolants, one gram of oil can absorb about 55% of the heat for the same rise in temperature (called the specific heat capacity). Oil has about 90% the density of water, so a given volume of oil can absorb only about 50% of the energy of the same volume of water. The thermal conductivity of water is about four times that of oil, which can aid heat transfer. The viscosity of oil can be ten times greater than water, increasing the energy required to pump oil for cooling, and reducing the net power output of the engine."



From an engineering standpoint, this all starts with one primary constant -- the contact surface area of the outside of cylinders is fixed ; it all follows on from that constraint. Incidentally, the flow of coolant around/through an IC engine cooling circuit, is something like 1 ~3litres/second (depends on the engine power) --> Try pumping oil at that rate, and see how much power you need to turn that pump.

[wotnot]

It does sound too good to be true to me, however, it does seem to work.

Oops! I meant to comment on this, just because I know you ride a bike old'mate ...can you even imagine how much oil there'd be on the road, if they (could) do something like this? ...lol.. =)

It wouldn't work, that simple. When I mention the fixed area of the outside walls of the cylinders the coolant can contact and remove (heat) energy from, it obviously goes a long further than that -- there's the heat transferred into the block itself, the heat generated at the top of the combustion chamber/exhaust gas flow in the cylinder head, and the flow of coolant through the block cavities, and passages lead up to and through the coolant cavities into and out of the cylinder head, are all sized and shaped to work with a coolant of specific thermal capacity..ie; water, to ensure adequate excess heat removal from the system, in a controlled way....ie; the engine block/cylinder head doesn't have 'hotspots' due to inadequate cooling due to insufficient coolant flow/transfers surface contact area. If you use a coolant with less than half the specific thermal capacity than that of water, you are going to need to double the flowrate and/or increase the heat transfer contact area, to achieve the same amount of heat energy removal from the engine, to stop it from overheating (thermal runaway)...

...perhaps an easy 'real world' example would help explain it....and here we don't have to worry about coolant fluid viscosity and blablabla, and keep within the manufacturer's premise of what the engine cooling package they chose to fit is supposed to do ...if the engine employs and alloy components in it's construction, you're going to need use an anti-corrosion/anti-freeze agent in the engine coolant...we don't often get to test out the anti-freeze component very much here in AU (depending on where you live =), but all these engine need the anti-corrosion component to help stop the erosion of the alloy components.

These coolant additives that come in the form that must be diluted with water for normal use, typically state that you should not exceed a 30% coolant additive/water ratio. (some coolants come premixed with water and can be used striaght from the bottle =) Why not use straight coolant additive, most of which are based on ethylene glycol? Well...basically you've got this heat exchanger system designed to move 'x' joules of heat energy, from the engine and and into the air via way of a radiator, with water as the heat transfer fluid -- water has a specific heat capacity of 4.18 J to heat one gram (one cubic centimeter) by 1 degree C -- for ethylene glycol, it’s 2.2 J/g-C. Ergo, If you run 100% anticorrosion/antifreeze out of the bottle that's designed to be mixed with water, you’ve effectively cut the capacity of the system to remove heat by almost 50%...it really is that simple, and -why- the instructions say mix with water.

I personally run 15% additive to water in my car, but do drop the coolant/replace it with fresh distilled water (supermarket) and additive every few years. Anyhow, if that's how it is with coolant anticorrosion/freeze additives in real life, just ignoring everything else here like coolant flow rates and pumping loses due to fluid viscosity, you're going from the ethylene glycol case of 2.2 J/g-C being half what you need for the system to work, to using oil instead which only has a specific heat capacity of oil...which is more like 1.67 J/g-C ..so now the coolant fluid has something like 55% less ability to remove heat, compared to plain old water...once again, you've nobbled the the cooling system.

Thought of another one, example that is....remember these?



Can't get much simpler than that, water jacket around the top of cylinder, the casting rising to form a large, open topped water reservoir, with steam vapors streaming from near boiling water therein. It works, because you can move a lot of heat energy if you can pass the coolant fluid through a change of state, and the reason that old thumper's cylinder doesn't overheat and seize, because we know how much energy it talks to boil water, and this engine cooling design relies on that equation....ie; think of it like how much energy it takes to keep 20litres water on the boil in an electric kitchen earn...(5, 2litre kettles all running in the kitchen =) ; this old hit/miss works, because it can move heat into boiling water, which we all know is 100C .-- there is no real equivalent property with oil ; rather, oils reach a temperature flash/smoke point, which is usually up over 200C and higher depending on oil type.

If you replaced the water with oil in the above simple engine, you remove it's ability to transfer heat energy into boiling water, and the cylinder overheats, causing catastrophic engine damage in the process. It'd take time in use, with the cylinder getting hotter and hotter as the heat energy builds up, because quite literally, it cannot let off any steam....so you're left with that 5, 2litre kettles boiling water worth of energy, that the engine has no way of getting rid of anymore =)

Water's pretty unique stuff when it comes to chemistry and physical properties..ie; oil contracts when it gets cold (increased viscosity), water expands when it gets cold (expands as it state changes into ice), it's a curiosity unto itself really, but, it's these unique properties of water that's being utilized by engine cooling systems (not just IC engines, electrics as well, like engine coolant cooled alternators, water cooled electric motors etc), as -part- of that system's design...oil and water are typically not interchangeable ...

I'm not sure what the failstate progression would be if one actually did it...ie; grab a venerable Holden 202 red-motor, lash it to a dyno and use oil instead of water as the engine coolant - I reckon the first fail, would be the A section fanbelt not having enough grip, to transfer the power required to rotate the pump that was designed for water, not oil =)

[VroomVroom]

More than a century of development and design improvement by engineers, since the invention of the internal combustion engine, and not once has there been a cooling system that uses oil instead of water to remove waste heat from IC engines --

thats not quite right mate , mixing coolant and oil is a standard design feature built into all European cars like BMW , VW and Audi. Once the vehicle is out of warranty the cylinder head is designed to crack open and begin transfer of the two fluids......The system is so effective that the engine stops and therefore all waste heat is removed permanently...

[enf]

thats not quite right mate , mixing coolant and oil is a standard design feature built into all European cars like BMW , VW and Audi. Once the vehicle is out of warranty the cylinder head is designed to crack open and begin transfer of the two fluids......The system is so effective that the engine stops and therefore all waste heat is removed permanently...

My waterless VW's were all fine.......

[Uncle Fester]

Yeah adding water in the radiator was always a big no no with most of my more expensive cars in Germany. Alone the corrosion risk but of course also what happens in winter when the mixture is wrong.
Gycol compounds traditionally used actually feel a bit oily but are water soluble for the mixtures. They have also been used by scammers to make cheap wine taste 'expensive', despite the toxicity.

Those Russians should try Vodka in their radiators.
Probably cheaper there than oil or demineralised water

[Uncle Fester]

thats not quite right mate , mixing coolant and oil is a standard design feature built into all European cars like BMW , VW and Audi. Once the vehicle is out of warranty the cylinder head is designed to crack open and begin transfer of the two fluids......The system is so effective that the engine stops and therefore all waste heat is removed permanently...

BMW has always been like that.
However it was attributed to the driving style back then(in D-land).
First thing a typical BMW driver does when he gets in the car at -20˚C is to floor the throttle. Only if it has a racing seatbelt rig might he have considered connecting that first because it looked cool.

If you wanted to buy second hand then be sure it has just got the replacement engine, usually around 80k km.
A mistake I made with a 525 over 35 years ago. It had a tiny sports steering wheel, golden wide wheels and parking in tight spots was torture.
That fun ended 3 months later in smoke.
I straight away bought another used 5er BMW that had been driven by an elderly lady (first owner), the first vehicle I had with power steering.
I had also followed the advice to wait until the temp meter shows some reading before I floored it.
It never missed a beat.

[enf]

.............................

Those Russians should try Vodka in their radiators.
Probably cheaper there than oil or demineralised water

Should try more Vodka in their stomachs. If they have enough they'll think their cars fly.

[wotnot]

My waterless VW's were all fine.......

Funny story....remember back in the day of the VW buggy (and sometimes VW bugs), with the de-hooded exposed engine hanging out the back? We had one come into the shop on a trailer, a bit of a barn find as it were, and the owner had stripped it back and cleaned it all up, and it apparently 'ran fine' for weeks worth of short drives, but only lasted for about an hour on it's first long run going north to the sunshine coast, before developing loud bigend/crankshaft knocks and started leaking lots of oil out the rear crankshaft seal, while apparently smoking out of every orifice it could -- owner was perplexed, because the engine had been serviced, fresh oil etc, and had been running fine. This was apprenticeship days for me, so as always one got all the remove, disassemble, clean jobs =)

What I found as the cause, was after removing the air blower assembly and all the cooling air shrouds and tin plates, where-ever this thing had been sitting for years, had a healthy population of small mud-wasps, and they'd found the oil-cooler (which you never usually see) was a really good place to build in, and thus nearly 70% of the radiator air passages of the oil-cooler were totally blocked =) Obviously the oil simply became super-heated and got to flash/smoke point, and had stopped being a lubricant long before it got to this point...like, there was evidence of internal crankcase fire, the bottom-end was totally trashed, replace not repair. I recall my mentor saying to me, that if you were able to look into this while it was still running with oil at 250C or so, in slow motion you would've been able to see puffs of smoke coming from the big end bearings on every power stroke, as the added pressure was enough to take the oil temp beyond flashpoint ;-)

...you gotta watch out for mud-wasp incursion wrt any air-cooled engine that's sitting around for a couple of weeks too long...even lawn-mowers, little buggers build inbetween the cooling fins of barrel/heads, up under the cowling.... there's even a mud-wasp small enough to build inside tiny 1mm breather holes in carbys if you leave them open to the natural environment, you gotta bag nearly everything B)

[wotnot]

BMW has always been like that.
However it was attributed to the driving style back then(in D-land).
First thing a typical BMW driver does when he gets in the car at -20˚C is to floor the throttle.

Damn, this is real life if I've ever seen it ~ I worked with a German EE, and every single time he started his new Falcon with factory Barra 6 in it -- foot to the floor ; crank engine until it starts ; hold it at full throttle until the oil pressure builds up, and all the clacks and rattles in the engine go away..FFS...what a total lack of mechanical sympathy -- add 6months, car disappears for a 'service'... for a fortnight ...and reappears again with a new crate engine fitted. I can only guess he never told the dealership about his cold-start procedure...

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

Damn, this is real life if I've ever seen it ~ I worked with a German EE, and every single time he started his new Falcon with factory Barra 6 in it -- foot to the floor ; crank engine until it starts ; hold it at full throttle until the oil pressure builds up, and all the clacks and rattles in the engine go away..FFS...what a total lack of mechanical sympathy -- add 6months, car disappears for a 'service'... for a fortnight ...and reappears again with a new crate engine fitted. I can only guess he never told the dealership about his cold-start procedure...

I actually knew an idiot like that. He thought it was a effective way to warm up a cold engine.

Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk

[lsemmens]

Thanks wotnot, the discussion that followed the op did disabuse me of the notion that it was likely to work, As I said in my OP, it seems to work. And, strictly speaking, it does work.....for a short time.

[Ah-Those-Old-Days!]

Thanks wotnot, the discussion that followed the op did disabuse me of the notion that it was likely to work, As I said in my OP, it seems to work. And, strictly speaking, it does work.....for a short time.

(OP here...). A few points. I don't understand why some people think I was talking about 'Adding Water to Oil' ?? Although in my original video link, they 'did' that
deliberately at first, to show one direction of flow from the head, by cutting the head gasket in a particular place. However, LATER!, after making head gasket cuts
to the high pressure oil ports too, they TOTALLY replaced all the engine water, with oil.

I'm also at a loss as to why 'wotnot' was going out of his way to denigrate me, in various ways, about my lack of intelligence, & likening me to a 'Flat-Earther' too??
I don't understand why people have to be so nasty, instead of reading it as intended. I truly do not believe that anyone else that read this post, thought that I was
daring to say that dumb-ass mechanical engineers have got it wrong all these decades!! hahaha. Nor that oil is better than water as a thermal conductor...

Simply that it was an interesting, (and tongue-in-cheek!) experiment that would be fun to try for laughs on some old bomb. Have a good day...

[wotnot]

Thanks wotnot, the discussion that followed the op did disabuse me of the notion that it was likely to work, As I said in my OP, it seems to work. And, strictly speaking, it does work.....for a short time.

You are most welcome ; I know you love a bit of banter ..having ridden streetbikes years ago, and more than several times come across diesel/oil on the road, that quickly pushes the pucker factor up to 10, it was one of the first alarm bells that went off in my mind =) I had one of those flashback events of that Moto3 race years ago, when one rider's engine decided to push the rod out the side, and it dumped it's crankcase of oil on the tarmac and brought down half the field 8) I think the only thing worse than diesel/oil on the blacktop, is 'black ice' like I once came across riding around Glen Innes...you fall off and go wtf? until you go to stand up and fall over...and the penny drops.

...I was trying to think about the pumping losses that would be incurred, by the more viscous fluid (oil) at the coolant re-circulation pump...aka: engine water pump. It's a difficult number to fathom...water pump BHP draw has been measured before, and it's somewhere in the order of 7~9 BPH max depending on engine/engine RPM. However, the problem is that typical pump impellers/housings have been designed to work with water, and beyond a certain impeller RPM you're going to encounter fluid sheer with oil, little throughput, and the pump will actually be heating up the oil even more.

Cat's piss would work for a longer amount of time 8) You'd wanna use plenty of anti-corrosion additive that's for sure....even straight ethylene glycol is a better option - you might be 50% down on cooling capacity, but at least you didn't add to the re-circulation pump losses =)

The other thing that made me laugh, was this fanciful notion that having 4~5litres of oil in the sump, was going to help the situation...BzzzT!...wrong ; this is the 4-5litres of engine oil, that's routinely in the 100~140C range (due to oil heating in bearings, on cylinder walls, and under pistons where oil squirts are using, etc etc) , and this is somehow going to help you cool an engine design to run and not destroy itself, with coolant running around it at around the 75-85C heat range?...I mean, granted, diesel engines tend to run at higher operating temp, but not -that- hot...and we haven't even considered costs ; my brother-in-law already spits chips everytime he replaces the 40litres of coolant in his truck - oil is a lot more expensive than glycols and water ; air as a coolant tends to be cheapest.

The remark about maybe in Russia (or some of the Scandinavian countries), where it is so frigging cold, you could get away with something like running oil instead of water as coolant for quite some time, especially if it was a low revving diesel, it could take hours for the things to warm up, but eventually the laws of thermal dynamics are going to catch up, if you're producing more (detrimental) excess heat, than you can get rid off ; it's called physics =)

When you build circuit/race engines, you often come up against engine cooling issues ~ you typically get boxed into a corner ...it begins with a stock engine maybe making 200 BHP, and you go all stupid with the internals and making it reliable pump out 400 BHP ...twice as much ; because you're burning more fuel with more air at usually a greater rate (higher rpm), the production of waste heat goes up proportionately....the most extreme recent example I can think of, if the W16 mill in a Bugatti Veyron -- bit over 1,000BHP for the right foot to play with ~ a heat equivalent of 2,000HP of generated waste heat in the process...that's... like right out there =) You're limited to the vehicle size/shape as to how much bigger or how many additions radiators you can install, and diverting air through radiators incurs drag, so it's already catch22 from the get go...

...then, right, it becomes a rock and a tight spot, because you've got this engine assembly with cooling water-jackets and passageways, designed to carry away the excess heat of 200 BHP worth of combustion...and you're doubling that. You can't change the physic size and coolant/metal contact area in the engine, so the only thing left for you, is to increase the flowrate of the coolant through the engine ; the moment you do this, any given cubic centimeter of water, spends less time in the engine to absorb heat ; it's always a fine balance...

The thermal conductivity of the coolant is what we're on about here, how quickly the fluid absorbs a specific amount of heat over time -- it's measured as watts per meter per degree Kelvin --- oil is around 0.141 ; water is 0.609 ...plain English, water moves heat energy roughly 6 times faster than oil...this is a critical properly to have, when you've got 2 extremes of engine operation...basically idle and full throttle ; the minimum amount of heat produced to the maximum, and anywhere inbetween (normal road use) ; the more power you make, the more heat you produce, and the coolant needs to move more heat, faster, from the engine and into the ambient air ; oil's not quick enough to do that, it's just the way it is. I blame God personally...hehe...

[wotnot]

(OP here...). A few points. I don't understand why some people think I was talking about 'Adding Water to Oil' ?? Although in my original video link, they 'did' that
deliberately at first, to show one direction of flow from the head, by cutting the head gasket in a particular place. However, LATER!, after making head gasket cuts
to the high pressure oil ports too, they TOTALLY replaced all the engine water, with oil.

I'm also at a loss as to why 'wotnot' was going out of his way to denigrate me, in various ways, about my lack of intelligence, & likening me to a 'Flat-Earther' too??
I don't understand why people have to be so nasty, instead of reading it as intended. I truly do not believe that anyone else that read this post, thought that I was
daring to say that dumb-ass mechanical engineers have got it wrong all these decades!! hahaha. Nor that oil is better than water as a thermal conductor...

Simply that it was an interesting, (and tongue-in-cheek!) experiment that would be fun to try for laughs on some old bomb. Have a good day...

Oh goodgrief, I'm not going out of my way to denigrate *you*, in fact I said no slight intended ; I would've responded exactly the same way to -whoever- posted a new thread, centered around described topic.

That is to say, this forum is self described as 'Austech - Australian Technology Discussion Forum', and if you raise a topic for discussion like this, in a technical forum (more overly biased in the electrical/electronics/RF equipment niches), odds are someone's going to give a technical explanation of why it's stupid/silly, and tear it to shreds from every angle possible (especially a cert. motor mechanic/engine builder).

I do recall a recent post by our C&C, Admin, expressing some concern with the rise of non-technical discussions going on in this place, and this would be a prime example. In a technical forum like this, a thread topic of this nature might fly, if it were presented like a mythbuster's piece ...ie; 'I saw this on a Garage64 YT vid, and decided to try it myself with an old Holden Gemini, and here are the results', and you present the data. That'd work I think.

Effectively what you've done here, is 'retweeted' some BS on youtube, made it look like a 'sensationalized' by use of caps and multiple exclamation marks, which gives it the look of 'click-bait', and do so in a technical forum asking 'what am I missing?' ...and somehow not expect some fact based technical explanation detailing all the things you're missing? You gripe because we're all having poop and laughter with the water in oil business ; this is because a forum full of technical minds, are going watch the entire vid, not just focus on the portion that interests you -- look at my first reply -- beginning para is wrt 1st portion of video -- second (edit para is wrt 2 part of vid (the bit you're interested in).

It becomes a big, long winded, tangential explanation, not just about IC engine operation, but really stupid simple obvious stuff, like fromaron's observation about it happened in the dead of Russian winter, where the air temperature was as likely -10C than not. ..the next questions become does that matter? And by how much? It goes on and on -- end of the day, only empirical data is going to count.

There's a plethora of BS on youtube, a good deal of which has no place in this forum, not even in general chat. Think like this -- someone comes along and creates a thread here with the topic line 'New FREE energy device made!!!!', and then using a YT vid for example purposes, and then positing 'it appears to work', all of the speculative justifications, and asking 'what am I missing?'....it's the same stuff, yeah? You've apparently taken umbrage at flat earther reference, but that's my humour -- YT and other social media are reportedly reasonable for that estimated 15% of Americans who believe (for real) the Earth is flat.

As {ahem} technically minded adults, we shouldn't regurgitate non-scientific non-sense like this, in technical forums like this ~ it doesn't wash well. There is every chance..that the unknowing and mechanically uneducated, will watch a YT vid like that, and surmize they don't need to care about seeing water, and if they get really stuck and it's because they've run out of engine coolant (due to a leak or whatever), it's going to be ok to top up the radiator with oil, and she'll be right mate. You cannot keep stressing the words FOR FUN, and think that makes serious, technical considerations go away. Now that one video exists, others will emulate it for FUN as well...they're headed for the same bad result in the end.

You don't really understand what you've done, or what's at play, but that's ok...like Mr Incredible, "I've got time" ....to explain that is. Now that YT vid exists and other examples are bound to follow, invariably folks out there in the world are going to google the string 'can I use oil instead of water in my car radiator?', and chances are in those search results will include reference to this Austech forum thread --- in that perhaps case, a technical forum such as this, should provide as detailed and technical explanation, of why it's BS, but it doesn't hurt to put the cliff notes out there -- engineers haven't chosen to do it for over a 100 years ; safe bet there's something wrong with the idea.

It's not a matter of what you do or don't know -- it's more common sense and Occam's razor a lot of the time =)