Acceptable Levels of Wear Question

[ZZman]

Looking at the UOA's people like to see zero or single digit results. However in the BITOG section on "What is Oil Analysis" it shows much higher numbers as being acceptable. Example: Iron is acceptable at 100-200 ppm. I think this would give most forum members a heart attack!

What does acceptable mean? how would it really affect the life of an engine if you got a consistent 100 ppm and another got 20 ppm.

To tell the truth I don't think I have ever seen a UOA with ppm numbers as bad as what they call acceptable except for maybe a few odd copper numbers.

 

[Pablo]

PPM of metals in a UOA are not necessarily "Levels of Wear".

 

[tig1]

I know some UOA come back showing M1 5-30 with what is preceived to be high iron when in reality those numbers my not translate to shorter engine life at all. My question is,does this 4x-8x thing with the seq 4 test iron wear really fit into high iron according to the UOA real world. Does the test really reflect in actual wear of the engine. The reason I ask is that the iron with mt UOA on both my 4.6 and 2.0 Ford over head cam engines have shown fairly low iron.

 

[simple_gifts]

Quote:

To tell the truth I don't think I have ever seen a UOA with ppm numbers as bad as what they call acceptable except for maybe a few odd copper numbers.



https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/posts/1196871/

Going from 2ppm to 4ppm is a miniscule increase in wear when matched against condemnation limits; too many people get hung up on "twice as much wear"

 

[Eddie]

Look at http://www.dysonanalysis.com That very good analyzer (Terry Dyson) is THE source of understanding the meaning of wear values. I was amazed at the people who stress over a difference of 12 ppm over 6 ppm wen in most cases it means nothing.

 

[nicrfe1370]

I think we don't really know what is acceptable and what is not in passenger vehicles. The alarm limits that we can find on various sites (including BITOG) seem to be developed for large trucks in commercial fleets, and other applications these motors see (generators, marine, etc.) I gather that until us crazies at BITOG started sampling oil from our cars for fun, the number of people sampling oil from passenger cars wasn't even a blip on the radar screen. Also, there have been UOA's on motors with known mechanical problems that show wear numbers well below the 100ppm alarm limit we see thrown around sometimes.

Perhaps most important is the following; if we didn't get worked up over wear in the tens or twenties when we wanted to see single digits, then there wouldn't be any point in sampling our oil, posting on the site, and discussing amongst ourselves. We're doing this for fun!

 

[rg200amp]

Originally Posted By: tig1
My question is,does this 4x-8x thing with the seq 4 test iron wear really fit into high iron according to the UOA real world. Does the test really reflect in actual wear of the engine.

The Iron is coming from something.

ALL of todays API cert oils will show different wear in the same crankcase. Some will cause more, some will cause less. Whatever name brand oil you use, it will get your engine as far as that engine can go.

 

[[RT] ProjUltraZ]

i wonder how much old metal from the bottom of the pan influences the reading. i have magnets on the pan now near the drain plug (also magnetic) so there's a lot of magnetic influence at that corner. oh well i guess we're looking for large trends anyway