Synthetic vs. Regular Oil. Help!

I'm getting ready to do my first oil change in my 3000GT an i was wondering if I should synthetic or regular. Ive heard if you change from synthetic to regular it could be hard on your engine

Do a search... It's a re-occurring subject... Most of it was covered in this thread:

http://www.automotiveforums.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=457132&page=1

You don't want to switch to synthetic. The possibilities of leaks for the age of your engine are a lot more probable. Just stick with a good petroleum based oil.

i;ve used full synthetic how does it hurt the engine?

synthetic oils are much finer than petroleum oils, so the synthetics will get in all the tiniest crevices that the petroleum oils might not get in. and so, as the car gets older, if you switch to synthetic, then you're more likely to have some leaks, whereas the petroleum oil wouldn't leak.

so synthetics won't "hurt" your engine directly, but if it is thusly more prone for leaks with the switch to synthetic, then if you leak enough oil, there's inherent damage that can occur due to lack of lubrication.

that's the basics, but i'm sure there's more to it and someone will chime in the the details (2Old?)

It's actually the cleaning action of the detergents that cause the leaks but Linebckr pretty much summed it up and a good portion was covered in the thread I linked to.

I was just reading it over and I guess I should point out that as long as your engine is not leaking oil or built in the 1980 or earlier, Synthetics are by all counts better then Conventional oils.

I have a 92 Dodge stealth with 180K kilometers on it (I guess that would be 120K miles) and have been using synthetic for as long as I have owned it (6 years) and I haven't seen any leaks and it's still running strong.

I don't really want to sound like commercial or repeat information so I won't go into details unless someone asks a specific question...