[plano_doug]

I found my G6's oil level quite high. My wife thinks she overfilled it. But I wanted to be sure there was nothing else amiss, so I Googled for an "oil analysis kit" and found these at O'reilly Auto Parts.

I chose the lowest priced one (without the 3' of siphon hose), $17.99. My local store had not heard of it, so I printed out the web page and took it to the O'Reilly commercial store on Forest Lane in north Dallas. They had it.

I'm mailing the oil sample this morning, and will post back here in a few days when I get the results. I'm thinking this is a pretty cool service to have. The price seems reasonable (18 bucks plus tax and postage) to find out if I have something in the oil that's not supposed to be there. Of course, I'd prefer it to be free and provide instant results, but that ain't available. Given that, and thinking thru the alternatives, this is the next best thing, at about 20 bucks and few days of waiting. And I'll probably forget about it before I get the results

Doug

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[CruisinG6]

Interesting.
I'm curious what it comes back with.

 

[waterfowler76]

interesting.
I'm curious what it comes back with.

x2

 

[plano_doug]

Interesting.
I'm curious what it comes back with.

Sorry for the long delay. It took a couple weeks to get the results - long enough for it to slip my mind.

The report is linked below. It's only two pages. I was a bit frustrated by the 2-week turnaround. If I was waiting on the data in order to fix the car, that would have been very frustrating. Part of the delay was the mail, which was kinda slow. But I frequently get small packages mailed cross country in about 3 days, so maybe some lobbying with the post office is order at Wix.

Otherwise, it's still not a bad deal, about 18 bucks.

http://www.doug79.com/pontiac-g6/2007-G6_Gasoline%20E_14789458_Normal_13333076.pdf

(The doc is only 152 KB. But the upload limit here is 98KB. So that could stand to be raised a bit.)

Rather than mail order, if there was a local lab, I'd be willing to pay a few more bucks for quicker turnaround, if I'm hurting for the data.

The data is summarized on the first page of the report. The good news is that there was no coolant in the oil, which is what I was worried about.

There are graphs on the second page, but they appear incomplete. The mileage is listed on the horizontal axis, but there are no curves. Either my pdf reader is not rendering them correctly, or, as I suspect, because there is only one datapoint for each graph (at 144985 miles) there are no curves to show, since at least two datapoints are required, if they are trying to show a trend (up or down) versus mileage.

Nevertheless, I do notice the empty graphs look different in Adobe Reader X versus XI. In XI, there are gray horizontal lines which don't show up in X. But in neither reader, nor in Adobe Acrobat Pro 7.0, do I see any data points or curves.

FWIW, when I generate a pdf, I usually output it to be compatible with version 5 so that folks with older software can still read it.

Anyway, in summary, for about 20 bucks, you can get an oil analysis done in about 2 weeks.
...
In my case, since coolant wasn't leaking into my crankcase, I wasn't too worried about the leak, as long as we could keep it topped off. But I finally fixed it recently when it was observed to be leaking faster. (Related post here.)

Doug