Some years ago I got a spike in silicon and copper in oil analysis. It was posted here in various threads related to oil analysis. It turned out to be a little gap, about 3mm, in the alternate air door, allowing soil ingestion (the silicon) and causing excess wear of soft metals (copper and others).
Quite funny to get one of Savvy’s business promotion circulars mentioning exactly this problem
Whenever we see elevated iron, the first thing we ask ourselves is “was this engine inactive?” Steel cylinder barrels almost always rust during periods of disuse—particularly in humid climates like the DFW area where Jay is based—and that rust scrapes off when the engine is run and shows up as elevated iron in the next oil sample. Jeff asked Jay about this, and Jay admitted that the airplane had been down for a month and a half for its annual inspection and then sat awhile longer while a new GPS navigator was being installed in the panel. That seemed to explain the elevated iron.
