First Oil Analysis
 

I got my first oil analysis back, and wanted to share here:

http://i.imgur.com/5r7Cctt.png

Have a look, and let me know your thoughts.

Don't see it. Please fix your link/image.

Thanks, it should be fixed now.

First UOA, only one test, so it's only your baseline. Is that Mobil Delvac Turbo Diesel?

Your numbers are not awful, but not great.

How long would it take you to drive another 2,000 miles? Change oil at 2,000 miles and re-test.

I'd also recommend you swith to Mobil 5W50 oil. If you drive in the cold months, run Mobil 0W40 and then swith to Mobil 5W50 for March-November.

Some thoughts:

This oil is not full synthetic. It contains sulfur. Not a good idea in an full aluminium engine.

The detergents for a diesel engine are different from an fuel engine. Don't understand why you choosed that oil – because of zinc?

But i think the problem here is the amount of metal found in the oil. Because of the iron and chromium maybe you should check the IMSB. Don't know if that is caused by the diesel engine oil.

Regards, Markus

I'm not sure what oil the OP just drained, but Mobil 1 Delvac (Turbo Diesel 5W40) is a full synthetic oil. Infact, the entire "Mobil 1" brand is full synthetic.

The oil that came out, and went in was the Mobil Delvac 1 5w40 - fully synthetic.


Unfortunately 2000 miles from now is still a while away. Likely late spring.

Are the elevated metals consistent with IMS wear? I'm eager to get more data points.

It depends on what you call "synthetic". Ever since Mobil lost their spat with Castrol in the late 90s, all synthetics made in North America are allowed to use Group III base oils, which is basically conventional mineral oil that goes through an extra refining process to remove wax. Using a Porsche A40 spec'd made in Europe synthetic will virtually guarantee a high quality Group IV oil.

Don't bet on it, there are very few mass produced Group IV oils available in the market, and exactly none of them say Mobil 1 on the containers.

Good looking sample.. Can't tell the whole story without TAN and TBN values, but they charge more for that..

The Zn and P are very high for Delvac. Thats a strong anti- wear package compared to regular old M1

Listen to this guy. Read it 3 times. He's the UOA whisperer. And you just got $150 of advice for free.

Thanks for this. It'll help me sleep at night.

I'm going to stick with the delvac for now and see how the next test goes. Thanks everyone.

People often overlook the fact that diesels do not use catalytic converters like gas engines, and continue to use high ZDDP concentrations because of the bearing loads created by tier much higher cylinder pressures. They also tend to have higher detergency additive packages as well.

Would you care to expand on this? Are you implying my cat is likely to fail prematurely if I'm burning some oil?

Will the additional detergents give me issues?

The answers are all on BITOG.
The other advantage of a very few 'diesel' oils is an anti-foam additive. Foaming is a problem on a few specific(Ford) TD engines and.............the M96

From personal experience, I feel the impact of ZDDP on cats is way overblown. We have customers that have only run high ZDDP oils in engines that regularly consume some oil, after 165,000 miles their cats are fine. At the same time, newer cars running low SAPS oils (read little or no ZDDP) continue to suffer cat failures that are traced to the use of crap gas rather than oil additives.

Does ZDDP getting into cats have an impact on their life expectancy? The answer is yes, but those test were basically drowning them in ZDDP to see what happens. Hell, if you take enough aspirin it will kill you, but long before you reach fatal levels you would be so sick to your stomach, you would puke it all up. The test run by the car makers to get the EPA to start limiting ZDDP use in oils is based more on the fact that the car makers are on the hook to replace the cats for up to 8 years or 80K miles, then on real world oil consumption. To even approach the ZDDP exposure used to show the effect, you would have to have a car that burnt oil so bad it would look like a mosquito sprayer, and then drive it for half a million miles.

At the end of the day, your trade off is possibly having to replace cats, which can be changed in your driveway using simple hand tools, or a new engine. I know which I would choose.

The extra detergent will only clean out any build up in your engine, which might frighten you the first time you saw the blackened oil, but it would have no other detrimental effect.

Also correct, but foaming related problems are more limited to sustained high RPM runs, such as on the track. The effect is minimal on the street.

If anyone wants an M96-specific UOA, RND offer it.
It is also the cheapest place to buy JGDT40 if you include the value of their UOA.

In my not so humble opinion you have nothing to wory about. Im assuming this is your first uoa after buying your car. When i bought mine iron was in the 30s after my first uoa but thr previous owner did 10k mile oil changes. I did some low mile oil changes and after one or two the numbers were below the averages.

There are more acronyms in this thread than a US Dept of Defense handbook [emoji12]


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