Help me interpret this blotter test

[moribundman]

quote:

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[Off Topic!] mori - I understand all that.

The picture is ORANGE - I mean BRIGHT ORANGE - WAY more than normal color temp delta. [Off Topic!]

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The orange result is normal under tungsten lighting with daylight film or daylight white balance. A little underexposure will aggrevate the effect.

I took some blotter pictures, and I posted a few of them on the forum. There were no real changes from one to the next and I found the lack of dirt frustrating, so I gave up on blotter pictures.

 

[Pablo]

Probably agravated my wonderful, dieing Dell monitor as well

 

[moribundman]

Hey Pablo, I just noticed together we might be able to spell "aggravate" correctly. A team effort is needed!

 

[TallPaul]

Sone info on blotter spot interpretation from the Lubrication Field Test and Inspection Guide by James C. Fitch (not exact quote): The density or darkness of center spot indicates soot load, and distance of radial travel points to the quality of dispersancy. Any blotter without a dark center spot, rings, halos, sticky center, orange/yellow stain, or other noticable structure is usually servicable.

 

[yugrus]

I haven't experienced that myself, but the fuel dilution will supposedly give you multiple distinctive rings instead of just two like in your case. BTW, you can see the inner circle starting forming on the orange picture.
Water gives radial rays coming from the center ring. Glycol should be visible as a black pasty center circle.
I established the baseline with my blotter GC samples, so now I can compare my next test results. If something is different in the images at the given mileage, which will raise a flag.
My guess would be that you will have to have something really bad happened for the blotter test to indicate the problem, but what if you have no other way to know? I'm sure the test is worth my old business cards that I use for it.

 

[yugrus]

Oh, and highly oxidated oil will show a black inside circle with very sharp boundary.