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Pondering how the W-weight "colloquialism" ever got started--I know it's all wrong, but it's just so darned handy that I use it myself--just rolls off the tongue so much easier than "ISO" or "SAE" or "viscosity".
My hypothesis is that it started with the advent of multigrade oils, where the "W" was used to display the oil's equivalency under
winter test conditions, as in 10W-40, which tests like SAE 40 oil when hot but like SAE 10 oil when cold. People then made the understandable but erroneous leap from "W" for winter to "W" for weight. The "W" in Mobil's product in an entirely coincidental and equally uninformed way fed into this usage.
Does anyone remember the days before multigrade oils and if the oil viscosities we now refer to as, for example, "straight 30 weight" were then referred to in terms of weights? Or, was it referred to as SAE 30, or 30 grade, or 30 viscosity or somesuch?
Steve