Originally Posted By: dnewton3
Overall, not a bad report; nothing to be alarmed at. At least the fuel came down!
Please allow me to suggest that you quit wasting money on such expensive oils, if you OCI plan is 5k miles as you stated on page 1. Any brand of conventional oil can do 5k miles in a PSD. I would not hesitate to run an inexpensive oil such as ST 15w-40 for that duration.
Some people will bring up concerns about a 40 grade shearing in a PSD, however I've not seen any evidence that (while the oil will shear down) it ever manifests into a wear issue. Typically they will shear down to a 30 grade. Or, you can simply use a 30 grade to start with, and it won't shear much, if any, at all. There are many UOAs here to illustrate these points.
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The question about the bypass filter is a bit complex. I have my opinion; one that I developed while interacting with Gary Allan.
Normal wear particles are sized from sub-um to 15um in size. Also, the smaller the particle, the more predominant the particle in quantity. The typical UOA ppm counts for wear metals will be 1-25ppm depending upon engine, exposure, etc.
Your bypass filter is going to successfully remove particles above 2-3um with great effiency, and even smaller than that much of the time.
A UOA (spectral analysis) can see sub-um particles up to around 5um in size with reasonable clarity. (Plus, as I've recently learned, a UOA won't see all those particles, even in that visible range).
In essence, if you use a bypass filter, I see the topic breaking down like this (note - these are generalizations that will change a bit due to differences in BP filter performance brand to brand, lab testing, etc):
sub-um particles; very visible in UOA because the BP filter cannot get many of them at all
1-2um; seen reasonably well in a UOA because the BP filter is only getting a portion of them cleaned out of the flow stream
3-5um; BP filter is getting darn near all of them out of the flow stream therefore they will not be seen in the UOA
above 5um; the UOA cannot detect with any reasonable accuracy
The bypass filter removes particles above 1um, and the UOA can only view a portion of the particles with a reasonable upper limit of 5um. Therefore, the bypass filter has the ability to remove evidence of wear! That is not an issue when only utilizing a full flow filter as they do not filter down that small, so all the evidence stays in the oil. If you sample the sump only, and don't get a particle count out of the filter(s), you really don't know if the bypass filter is reducing wear, or just hiding wear ...
The advantage to BP filters is that they keep the oil cleaner for a much longer period of time. The downside to them is that, if you don't also analyze the filter contents, they are hiding wear from the UOA. You get a false sense of great wear because you're only seeing part of the evidence.
I have to agree with DNewton in regards to oil choice. I have been a 6.0 owner since the '04 model year and a couple of years ago I finially seen the light and switched to 10w-30(Deere Plus 50), 12 months a year. While I agree the shearing of viscosity doesn't seem to be related to engine wear, it bothered me that I was buying an expensive 5w-40 and after three consectitive runs of 7,500 mi. it sheared to a mid-low 30 wt., wear metals increased slightly vs. the previous 15w-40(Deere Plus 50) I had been using. While the 10w-30 does shear, I have not had a report come back where it had sheared as low as the 5w-40 did, and wear metals are back down to where they were before my 5w-40 "experiment". I have several UOA's posted here showing that 10w-30 has worked very well in my driving conditions. I keep reading everyone suggesting "synthetic oil is a must in a 6.0", quite honestly I have around 300,000 mi. combined in two 6.0's with never an injector problem or any other oil related problem. All of those miles were with Plus 50, other than the three 5w-40 runs, I don't know if its that much better than other brands or not, but I have certainly had good results with it.
As for your bypass filtration I don't know enough about the set-up to make an informed comment, I have had good results with the stock Racor setup. Overall a good looking report, a definite improvement over the previous one, but at such a short interval I would expect it to be excellent.