Quote:
Originally Posted by renaissanceman
I did remember that I replaced the vacuum pump at the beginning of this OCI. Could the break in of this pump over about 5k mikes contribute to the high iron, aluminum and nickel?
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That is a strong possibility. Even if you were clean clean clean during the install, there may have been dirt (casting material) and machining waste left over from the manufacturing inside the vacuum pump. That could easily skew the results.
I say sample again at normal interval, and watch the trend.
What did the oil sample before this say (if you have one)? If this is your first ever sample on this engine, you have no baseline reference. This sample would be a terrible baseline to start with, but you need to start somewhere.
If you recently switched from one brand of oil to another, the new oil may have better cleaning properties than the old, and now it is cleaning out some deposits, and THAT can make your results worse than normal as well.
I'm a big fan of Mobil 1 full synthetic oils. Mobil actually brought a lawsuit against another oil maker (Quaker?) for using the term "synthetic" when that company was using a blended synthetic base (or something like that), not a full synthetic like Mobil. The less-than-full-synthetic base is of course cheaper, so Mobil was losing market share because casual consumers would see both labeled "synthetic" and not understand there was a huge difference in the base stock, and sales would go to the cheaper oil. Ultimately Mobil lost that lawsuit, now one has to carefully research what base stock oils are used. My understanding is that Mobil and Amsoil both use full synthetic base stock, but I haven't checked that so take it with a grain of salt.
Bottom line: Now you have some objective information, and you can take actions (or not) based on that info. Realize that ANY oil you use now, which is diesel rated, is a far better oil than what was available when these cars were designed and built.