In the spirit of the title of the Hangar Talk forum 
I do oil analysis, and send off the sample to the lab in the USA - avlab.com.
The samples are just plastic bottles in a card box with a report form to fill in, purchased prepaid for some $10-15 each (much of that was the delivery cost to the UK, inappropriately sent by the most expensive courier option, because most US firms won't use Air Parcel Post).
A couple of samples ago, I got a rather elevated set of data, with a big increase in silicon (which is caused by soil ingestion and little else, apart from somebody throwing some sand down the oil filler hole) and a big increase in copper (which can be all sorts of things).
Signicantly, no other metals were elevated.
The most likely candidate for the soil intake was the alternate air door not closing properly, and sure enough there was a ~5mm gap. I got that fixed promptly.
The next oil sample was back within normal limits on both silicon and copper... but still a little high.
The following sample would obviously have been interesting, to re-establish a trend. It was taken at ~35hrs and included a trip to Greece and back.
Frustratingly it was lost in the mail to the USA.
Stuff lost in the mail is such a common thing (I've been in business since 1978) but can anybody explain where all the "lost" stuff is going? Out of the millions of tons of stuff carried by the 1st World's post offices each year, even 1% (which is about the order of the losses) is a massive amount of stuff which, if truly lost in the system, would fill their premises to the roof.
Next time I will take a 2nd sample and keep that, in case.
My guess is that it's delivered to the wrong address and the recipient bins it.
Update: it turned up, 8 weeks later!
In this case, it could be that it got reclassified as Surface Mail, which can take months.
Has anyone experienced this recently?
Two sent to Blackstone have vanished.
Recently there has been an issue in the UK whereby the Post Office misclassified oil samples as “waste” which made it illegal to send by post, but they retracted that. I have their statement somewhere confirming that oil samples are OK. However I have no idea whether this problem is in the UK or in the USA. And registered airmail is not trackable until it has been signed for at the destination, and if there is no delivery you get no info, which makes it worthless for this type of application. The only way to get continuous tracking is e.g. DHL but that’s of the order of £50 which is silly.
On the last service I took a spare sample and if I get any more vanish I will change over to Intertek (UK) whose results seem to be fairly in line with Blackstone’s (see link below).
Please note the discussion of why send to the USA is in other threads e.g. here.
Peter,
When I used to send my oil samples to Blackstone I used to label them ‘soil sample’ , they always made it.
I just send them as a letter without any declaration. Never lost a sample, usually takes 7-10 days.
The next sample made it OK… no customs declaration, and I called it “sample plastic bottle”.
What are you guys paying to send it to lets say Blackstone from Germany?
€3.40, less than the Straubing IFR fee.
I am still not doing Oil Analysis and have filled up the US online form from Blackstone twice in the last 2 years. Then I forget about it until I need to do an Oil Change
Is there any secret to getting them to send you the kits? Last time I mentioned in the notes to send me more sample kits than normal as I do 25 hour oil changes. Talk about a way to p*ss off a brand new customer.
Have I just been unlucky?
