What to track

[OneEyeJack]

What one individual item in a UOA would be a good indicator of wear if everything else is looking and running well? Something that might be easy and quick to measure?

Would it be something like iron?

Or.....?

 

[Kuato]

One thing? If you're going with only one I agree that iron is a good general wear indicator. But if other metals are ignored, bad things could happen (like bearing wear) and you wouldn't see it until it was too late.

 

[901Memphis]

Iron tracks with mileage so it wouldn't be abnormal unless it suddenly shot up to more than double what is the average for your engine.

I don't think you can look at just one thing. It's an entire snapshot that has to looked at together to get any sort of good data.

If one metal suddenly shows up in the 100+ range that was normally single digits that might be a bad sign

 

[DemoFly]

A single UOA tells almost nothing about wear.

Just contaminants and TBN.

You have to track UOAs for awhile to extrapolate data.

 

[zeng]

One item.... in Pb.
But alas, Pb and other bearing ingredients is always below 1ppm or so ....
in this scenario I'm prepared to accept highish Fe of 20-30 ppm per 10K (typically in Euro engines) as normal.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Originally Posted By: OneEyeJack
What one individual item in a UOA would be a good indicator of wear if everything else is looking and running well? Something that might be easy and quick to measure?

Would it be something like iron?

Say it is iron, how is that easy and quick to measure? You will still have to order a full UOA to obtain it, giving you all the items, so what is the purpose of limiting yourself to just a single item?

And as was mentioned earlier, a single UOA really isn't a good indicator of wear anyway. The only sure way is to take the engine apart and measure it, but of course that is neither easy nor quick.