Best/Cheapest UOA?

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Checked my oil yesterday and even after 3k it's still clear, translucent and doesn't smell much different than fresh oil, it's just dark brown in color.

Its wally world oil and despite having a lead foot I didn't burn a single drop of conventional after 3k. Additives are Rislone oil treatment and comp break in additive (Engine is a 76k replacement that I swapped my old VT components into) and I'm a bit anxious to see how well the oil held up, it's looking better than when I ran synthetic oil.
 
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Originally Posted by Hemispheres
Checked my oil yesterday and even after 3k it's still clear, translucent and doesn't smell much different than fresh oil, it's just dark brown in color.


Sounds like you have a nice, tight engine with very little blow-by. You would be a candidate for very long oil change intervals.
 
The "best" UOA is going to cost way more than any sane person would pay on a regular basis for their normal daily driven car. I started pricing some of the more advanced oil analysis tests (like filter debris analysis and analytical ferrography) which will tell you magnitudes more information about the state of your engine than a UOA ever will (FTIR is limited to analyzing particles smaller than what will really tell you there is an urgent problem), but just for reference, a filter debris analysis runs $345 at one lab I checked with. However, it will be able to "see" ALL the debris your filter caught over the OCI, and provide some analysis to where the particles originated and what kind of damage is occurring.

More in depth, personalized UOAs are provided by labs like Terry Dyson which provides extremely detailed opinions on what kind of oil and change intervals you should use, and those generally run $99-300 depending on your vehicle's intended use and how well you want to protect it.

But for the regular guy on here who just wants something to look at, UOAs from Wix, CAT, WearChek, Blackstone, Polaris... they all provide about the same data and range between $10 and $40 depending on the lab.

If you just want your engine to be able to make it to 300k miles (no guarantees the body of the car will last that long depending on where you live), just use any oil and filter from a big name brand and change it every 5k. But that's the simple way (and not much fun!
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