Also the difference with aircraft is, when you reach certain wear parameters or hours operating, the engine has to be overhauled no matter how well it's still running.

Because you want to minimise the chances of failure, for obvious reasons.

With a car engine you keep running it until it either fails, or develops obvious faults (smoke, lack of power, burning oil etc)

So the Defender engine might run for years with levels of oil contamination and wear particles that would render an aircraft engine unserviceable

 

Yes this is very true. Without a control, or baseline norms specific to the P400 engine, I'm largely in the dark. I was hoping to see a downward trend in iron etc.
I find it interesting all the same. $35 per sample isn't a big investment. But I agree. Not sure I'm seeing any benefit or value aside from satisfying my geeky tendencies and my penchant for tables of numbers.

 

I get the geek aspect to wanting to know. Even on airplanes, expensive turbines with loads of documentation, it is not infallible. I had a freshly overhauled PT6-114A. Irrational amount of money to do this, well after 35 hours I had a catastrophic failure. The #1 sleeve bearing was incorrectly installed. Had an oil analysis been performed in the first 10-20 hours might have seen really high levels of silver in the oil. Of course the first inspection is at 50 hours and oil analysis is usually annually performed. The sleeve bearing seized bent this cute titanium tube that transfers oil to the shaft spinning at 36,000 rpm. You can guess the rest. Being the only engine installed made it far more interesting. Being over Northern New Mexico, where the entire countryside was inspiration for Road Runner / Coyote cartoons was derived, made it terrifying. As you might imagine, not dead from that, but just barely made it to Gallup NM. Didn't make the actual runway, but hit in the dirt just past the fence and eventually ended up on the runway. Had I diddled a few seconds more, it would have been Viking Funeral for old Dogpilot in the trailer park. So while oil analysis had the potential to spot that impending failure, the less than constant monitoring made it, "oh that was too bad."

 

 

I did my 1st oil change at 5000 miles, and plan to change every 10,000 miles to keep an eye on excess metal readings.
(2023 P400, normal city/hwy combo driving)

 

Thanks for sharing that.

Looks your Iron and Silicon levels are comparable to mine.

 

As above, oil changed at 5,000 and 10,000.

Will get it changed every 10,000 from now on. Regardless of the arguments as to whether it's necessary, it can't do any harm.

As l plan to keep the vehicle until l retire (around 10 years/100,000 miles) it pays to look after it.

90% of "owners" in the UK are on lease or PCP and change the vehicle after three years, so they don't care if it's still on the original oil at 20,000 miles.

 

In addition to the more knowledgeable comments above, when I changed the oil at 5,000MI the oil coming out (vacuum method) was much, much darker than the Liqui Moly (LR spec) going in.

 

The black stuff tastes much better though.

 

I got my first NEW car ever in 1994, a Miata that I had been lusting after since I saw the first photo of one in R&T in 1989. I was a 3500-mile oil-change man with that car, mostly because I just loved an excuse to do something to it (nothing ever broke.) Once I was changing the oil and my visiting father-in-law was watching. When I slid out from under the car with the drain pan full of oil he said, “I’ve put oil INTO a car that was dirtier than that.”