Looking for piston aviation engine oil analysis
for our dear old Cont O-200A / no oil filter, just screen.
Can someone recommend please,
quick and relevant Lab with fair prices,
within EU member states.
We do our oil analysis there:
Have they come back down to earth ?
I was a fairly happy customer until…
1. They forced private customers to buy on amazon, only
2. Bundled the analysis with a useless plastic tool as an excuse for a 10% price hike
3. Blocked the use of the efficient customer app, meaning the customer filled out a paper slip every time again
Through these changes I was driven to a well known US lab service, which is better and cheaper (despite a significant cost for shipping the samples to the US).
Only downside is the waiting time from the shipping time.
I use Blackstone in the US.
Nothing wrong with an American company. Vastly more experience than anybody in Europe. Takes about a week to get there; sometimes longer but that is how airmail is in Europe alone (5 days plus luck).
as a maintenance manager for our Experimental Aviation of Switzerland association, I was, a few years ago, hunting for the same… a lab with fair prices in the EU.
Guess what, couldn’t find any at the time… the one’s found were outrageously expensive when compared to their US peers.
Another factor is the sheer volume the US labs have. A company like AOA (Aviation Oil Analysis), or Blackstone, sees literally thousands and thousands of samples a year.
The resultant is experience, meaning “they” know at which level which contaminant becomes a problem for this very engine. These labs provide an alerting system, either using a system of traffic lights and text (AOA), or more elaborate “personal” debrief (Blackstone), along trend graphs.
The turnaround time is pretty good, usually 2 weeks, and the shipping, at least for the smaller AOA container, is very reasonable.
The one big hurdle here in CHE, is that oil, even in minute quantities, is considered as dangerous goods, despite an opposite take from the US postal services…
Please don’t even think about asking how my samples ship 
UK to US is fine but postal regs indeed vary. One can call it “PVC contained sample” and hope…
When switching labs, one needs to be careful.
Given a sufficient demand, I may be persuaded to open an oil analysis lab here in Prague, and develop it according to the wishes of our community.
Ultranomad wrote:
Given a sufficient demand, I may be persuaded to open an oil analysis lab here in Prague, and develop it according to the wishes of our community.
Open it as a Kick-start project? People bringing in 1K Euro will get 20 tests free :)
That way there will be some commitment…
Thank you ALL for your kind answers and suggestions :)
Dear Anton, nice to meet you here, like to hear more ;)
Can be direct on email…
Given a sufficient demand, I may be persuaded to open an oil analysis lab here in Prague, and develop it according to the wishes of our community.
Sounds like a great idea, but you may find it a bit of a challenge dealing with the European pilot community, which AFAICS does almost no oil analysis, especially not consistently, and is likely to need a lot of supporting comms.
But if you do start, I can provide you with oil samples and reports for those samples from Blackstone. I have done 2x sampling a few times as posted here, offering it for comparison but there was zero interest.
