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FCP Euro Service Kits

FCP Euro Kits

Normally, if you suspect your engine is having some serious issues, the easiest way to figure out what is wrong is to take your car in to the local indie mechanic, exchange some cash, and walk out with either a fixed car, or at least knowledge of what’s wrong with your car. Most of the time, this will take a few hours out of your day, and not to mention a few hours of labour. After a few of these trips, you must figure that there has to be an easier way to examine the condition of your engine without requiring a mechanic with thousands of dollars of specialized tools like scopes, compression testers, and whatnot.

Fortunately, this exists. My trusty 1991 Volvo 940 GLE just turned over 416,000 kms, and still has not left me stranded. I’ll admit, there was a day or two that I didn’t know if I would make it to work, but time and again, once she was running, there was no stopping. Upon some odd symptoms of poor idling, a loud exhaust, puffs of white smoke, and other odd occurrences, I decided to get my oil examined by Blackstone Laboratories. What Blackstone is able to do, is take a sample of your engine oil, and tell you things about your engine that you may not even have thought of.

It’s a simple process. All you need to do is fill up a small container of oil when performing an oil change, send it in, and you’ll get a full report answering most questions that you may have. To prevent contamination, its best to grab oil mid-stream as it is coming out of the oil pan. My main questions that I wanted answered were:

1. Does my engine have a head gasket issue (I had been having a case of disappearing coolant)?
2. Are the piston rings on my engine wearing badly? (Potential cause of rough idling/general poor running)
I sent in my bottle of used 5W30 oil (regular, non-synthetic) and got a report within the week. The results were as follows:

Blackstone Labs Results

There’s a few things to take note from my results:

1. If you compare the values measured for my car after a 13,000 km oil change interval, you’ll see that most metallic measured elements are very close to the universal averages, which are averaged from a 7200 km oil change. Even copper and lead are lower than average. Looking at Iron and chrome wear (the B234F has an iron block) it is only slightly above average. If you consider my oil change was approximately twice the average distance this, in combination with the low readings of other metals indicates that all my rotating components are wearing very nicely.


2. With fuel levels low, this indicates minimal blow-by gases are entering the crankcase, which means my piston rings are probably okay. That’s good news!


3. For the bad news, as stated in the comments, my high potassium and sodium levels indicate a coolant leak in my engine which only means one thing: a head gasket issue.


4. Lastly, my oil change interval of 13,000 kms was not considered excessive by any stretch. Yes, Blackstone labs is recommending shorter oil change intervals due to my coolant leak, but apart from that, my oil is doing pretty good. The one positive to the headgasket problem that the reduced viscosity doesn’t hurt anything.

Although I am not too happy to know that I will need a new headgasket in the near future, the process to figure it out was simple, and at least I don’t need to do any more guessing. Besides, a new head gasket is better than new piston rings. If you’ve got any further input into what my analysis is telling me, feel free to let me know in my comments below.

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Written by :
Tim Wong

Tim is a Canadian from Windsor, with a knack for taking things apart, and sometimes putting them back together. He is a mechanical engineer by day and backyard mechanic by night. His mantra in life is to never break another bolt.


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