Just like visiting the doctor for your own health, whether you go when you feel sick, once a year or every other year, the same should apply to your vehicle and getting a regular fluid analysis done. People don’t understand how much it could benefit their vehicle.
In most scenarios, people just wait until a problem occurs with their vehicle and then they address it. But using fluid analysis to determine your vehicle’s system health can help prevent engine and transmission failures before they occur.
According to experts at AMSOIL, fluid analysis is a lab test performed on an oil sample from your engine or transmission that looks for wear metals, contaminants like water, dirt, or byproducts of combustion, the oil’s oxidation rate, and its viscosity. The report can help point to why any of those things may be occurring. It can also look at how additive formulations are doing in the oil. Are the additives living or are they getting destroyed and being consumed?
This might sound complex, but a lab is doing all the heavy lifting. All you need to do is pull a 4oz oil sample through your vehicle’s dipstick port or oil plugs, put it in a bottle and send it off to a lab for analysis.
AMSOIL experts warn that simply draining and flushing your fluids is not an answer to a potential “bigger picture” issue within your vehicle’s system. Flushing and filling with new fluid can mean continuing to have a problem within your system. You won’t know without an analysis, or until it’s too late and your vehicle has a problem or a failure.
How often should you be doing a fluid analysis? It depends a little on what you’re doing with your vehicle. If you’re annually putting on 10,000-20,000 miles, which most people do, a fluid analysis once a year is just fine. You could even do it every two years if your vehicle is newer. But, if you’re putting on a lot of miles within a year, a fluid analysis every six months is a good idea.
Now, assuming you find issues following a fluid analysis, it’s a good idea to have somebody help you read the report. You can use professionals at AMSOIL to help read the report for you and explain what it is telling you. From there, you can decide whether any action needs to be taken.
Again, comparing fluid analysis to a healthcare checkup, if you were told by a doctor that you’ve been diagnosed with something, you’re likely going to seek a second opinion. It’s no different in oil analysis. If you have a data point telling you something to be concerned with, perhaps you go a period of time and you take another sample and then you corroborate those results before making a decision on what to do.
However, if a single sample says everything’s catastrophic – your transmission’s falling apart, there’s iron all over the place, there’s clutch material all over the place, and your viscosity is two times what it should be – then, there’s value in addressing it right away.
In any case, it’s far better to catch something prematurely than ask for a failure later. That’s what oil analysis is designed to do – help catch something before it becomes a bigger issue.
The post What Does Fluid Analysis Reveal About Your Engine and Transmission? appeared first on Engine Builder Magazine.
