harryb49

How many people have had an oil analysis done and thought it was worth the $$$?

I just sent in a sample to Blackstone labs at the 10,000 mile mark to see how things were inside the motor. This report is supposed to give me some detailed info that lets me know if all's well in there. Hope I get enough detail to be worthwhile.


I get the feeling that they want ongoing samples to be sent in, at $22.50 a pop, to see how things are changing.

Guess we'll see early next week. Wish me luck.

bubba_zenetti

for your bike it is a waste of time *LOL* i see those things come through my shop with well over 80k on the clocks still purring like new and the owners are dropping in any oil they happen to get thier hands on from honda gn2 to god knows what. one thing they all have in common is they are chaning oil often. with a low revving engine like yours, punishing the oil is not a big concern.

at $22.50 each sample, i would just put that towards oil and stop thinking about it. just go ride your bike. goldwings last forever

harryb49

I've been told that my engine is de-tuned to last a long time and that any oil will be fine as long as I change it regularly but I'm pretty conservative and wanted to have a base reading to be sure my relatively new bike was in good shape.

At this time I don't think I'll be doing this on a regular basis. Thanks for the feedback.

VFRMike

If you act now, for only $9.99 I will tell you, your oil is dirty.

harryb49

Nice VFRMike......

It looked so dirty I couldn't quite see through the glass jar I used for my sample but I didn't think you were looking over my shoulder.

gixer_racer

yeah typically you do oil sampling on much more expensive engines.
As BZ said, routine oil changes will give you a long full life on your engine unless you have some extreme use for it.

If you need some help interpreting the results when you get it back though, give Coastie Pete a PM...his rate in the CG does a lot of oil sampling and he's good at reading them I'm sure.

Vigilante

As far as I know, the initial oil sample will give them a baseline to compare to later, so w/o additional samples, the 22 bucks may have been wasted. In industrial settings, oil samples are taken so you don't have to change thousands of gallons prematurely, and you may also detect if there is a problem w/ expensive equipment. Say you have an industrial crane and it has oil bath gearboxes (several of them). The crane isn't used consistently, and instead of changing the oil in the gearboxes when the crane hasn't seen any hours, take an oil sample of each gearbox, then compare them to each other. Now say that the analysis comes back and they are all similar except one gearbox has way high bronze content and you know that the bushings in the gearboxes are made of bronze... maybe you should do an inspection on the bushings in that gearbox. Some folks are taking the oil analysis to the automotive industry, but a specific problem in a GL engine would be difficult to track down by an oil sample imo, there are so many materials and wear places. Might be better to tear down your engine every 75K miles and inspect and compare to manufacturers tolerances.

They will probably need something to set the baseline for what the normal amount of contaminants is (unless they will tell you an average number, but I doubt they will do this, and will tell you it is different for every situation). Your new oil has some amount of debris in it as soon as you start your engine, and this will show up on the report, but how do you know if you should be alarmed or not? I am usually skeptical of these situations.

Although, with the "green" age we live in, I see people changing their oil sometimes way too often and could be considered wasteful. So in the future, maybe we'll all be doing oil samples instead of just changing it according the manual (or sooner like I and many others do).