Can anybody recommend a good oil testing lab, which is used to working with locomotive crankcase oil? We are most interested in labs in Canada, but I suspect this info will be useful to other museums and tourist railways across the continent.

In the past we have used the services of a major railway, but this opportunity has gone away with "progress".

Thanks,

Steve Hunter
SFRMEO

When I did heavy equipment repair, the local Caterpillar dealer did that stuff for a very reasonable charge

dr

http://www.oilanalysis.com/ very informative site on oil analysis...

http://analystsinc.com/ is the company that a company I worked for used a few years ago.

Stuart

Another good oil information site:

http://www.bobistheoilguy.com/

The forums have a section for posting UOA's. You can learn a lot there.

Steve, Imperial Oil in Sarnia did some oil testing for us at the Elgin County Railway Museum a couple of years ago, but we went through the local oil distributor, Dowler Karn, to do it. Dowler Karn has been a supporter of ours for years, so they arranged to have it done for free. If you are interest contact me off list and I will give you the contact information for them. No promises about any more freebees though.

http://praxis.staveleyfa.com/public/FLssrg.asp

RMNE has used this outfit for years. It was originally Cleveland Test Center (CTC) and started as the New York Central's oil test labs in the 1950s (another one of Al Perlman's "modern, push-button-railroad" ideas). They are now part of Staveley Services, and the Cleveland lab is certainly still railroad-oriented.

They supply sample bottles and mailers, and we pull a sample of engine lube oil about every 60 days of operation, mail it in, and then get a printed analysis sheet of the oil sample. If there's a more immediate problem, they call and/or fax us right away. The printed sheets show the history of the given unit's samples, in both chart and graph form, so it's easy to see a rise or fall in iron (liners), lead (bearings), silicon (dirt), etc. The testing is well worth the cost-- we'll run a unit for years without changing the oil (now about $2500 for an RS-3) and simply adding make up oil as we go, and having the oil sampled regularly.

They can also check gearbox oil samples, and even oil roller bearing boxes, if needed.

Howard P.

Thanks to all the helpful suggestions!

Since we're running Diol 13 RD40 in our unit, I'll follow k5ahudson's tip and check with our Imperial distributor in Ottawa on Monday.

Steve Hunter
SFRMEO

http://www.sfrmeo.ca/
http://elliottd.fotki.com/sfrmeo/