I just had my bearings changed and wanted to share my findings with this great forum in order to provide additional data points on these finicky S54 engines. Attached is the accumulation of all the past Blackstone reports to date. The Blackstone oil analysis, works, for the most part if you want to keep an eye on bearing wear. Looking back, I should have done oil analysis way earlier than my first one at ~28K miles. My thought was that the engine shouldn’t have any issues with so few miles, especially on one of the final iterations of the S54 (mine was the last few hundreds S54 built). So, you can see my shocked face when I saw the lead reading on my first report at ~28K.
The car is mostly a weekend car with some commute to work (approx. 30-minute commute). Very few, if any, short trips. Always let the car get up to temp prior to seeing 4K+ rpm.
- The first 2 reports you see is for Castrol TWS 10W60. Lead readings were extremely high for a low mileage car.
- Then I switched to Redline 5W50 (at 2015) to see if the lower viscosity oil (plus different formulation) will help, which it didn’t.
- Figuring that I will soon need to do bearings anyway, I decided to experiment with various additives to see if anything will help (I’m an engineer so I like experimentation and data collecting
). Since Redline 5W50 didn’t make a whole lot of difference, I went back to Castrol TWS Edge 10W60 (due to better availability in my neck of the woods) adding ZDDP to it – that is what you see on the 4th report (at 2016). No improvement with the added ZDDP either.
- Next up is Castrol TWS Edge 10W60 with Liqui Moly MOS2 moly additives (at 2017). This shows a very slight improvement, but not enough to definitively say it did anything to help.
- Final experiment is Castrol TWS Edge 10W60 with Liqui Moly Ceratec additives (most recent at 2018). This was the most surprise to me that any additives may actually help with bearing wear! However, with Lead dropping to a normal level now, either the Ceratec additives are doing an awesome job as advertised or that enough of the lead layer had already worn away that there is less of it left on the bearings to wear off to appear in the oil analysis? So, this is still inconclusive, at least in my case. I may use it again in the future if I ever see lead creeping again. So, this is very promising.
A couple of things that stood out to me regarding these oil analysis:
- My bearings are showing copper, so why didn’t the analysis show any increased level in copper since the initial 28K mile analysis? Blackstone didn’t seem to have an answer for this either.
- Lead readings had seen a slight decreasing trend. To most people, and even, from Blackstone’s comments, one would think the engine is doing better; but in reality, it’s actually not. I believed the main reason that lead is trending lower is because there are less lead to wear away on the bearings themselves.
This further emphasize that these analysis only work if you use it to look at their trends. Someone who has never done an oil analysis and suddenly decides to do one at, say, 100k miles to see a very low lead readings can get a false sense of security thinking everything is all well.
In any case, the decision had been made to have the bearings change out at ~55K miles due to a long streak of high lead readings no matter what the outcome was on the last report. The pictures speak for themselves. Definitely glad I had them replaced, but was very surprised to see their conditions for a well-loved and maintained (annual or ~5k mile oil changes) non-tracked car that is under 60K miles. I had decided to go with WPC simply because those had been around longer and not a single complain (that I know of) with them thus far. Lang Racing Development offered both WPC and BE Bearings for the same price - He doesn’t favor one over the other.
With the VANOS already updated with Beisan stuffs and now bearings, I’m hoping that it won’t need touching for another 100K other than valve adjustments and basic maintenance.
After all that, these reports raised another issue – rising sodium levels. I’m hoping sodium is part of the additives that I had been adding to the oil on the last 3 analysis – we’ll find out on the next report as I’m not running any additional additives on my current oil after the bearing change. I don’t think it’s antifreeze because I’m not losing any. I’m not sure why the report indicates a 0.23% antifreeze when Blackstone can’t conclude if the rise in sodium is caused by antifreeze due to the lack of potassium present? That 0.23% antifreeze is most likely “moisture” in the oil that they’re referring to since the sample was taken cold. Anyway - Any ideas what may cause a rise in sodium other than from antifreeze or oil additives?