understanding Oil Analysis
 

After a complete teardown and rebuild of our 82 911 engine, on startup and running for less than 1 hour we had a slight noise coming from the #1 bank. Removed the timing cover and discovered what appeared to us quite a bit of metal in the various cavities as well as a tooth missing from the timing gear and the following tooth slightly bent.
Replaced the gear, and still had the noise.

Sent a Oil sample off and received the following which we just do not have the expertise
to understand.
The report shows; copper 7, Iron 3, Aluminum 2, Lead 1, Silicon 2,
Sodium 122, Molybdenum 46, Calcium 2197,Magnesium 23, Zinc 859.
Any help in determining what all this means would be greatly appreciated.

Did you change your oil and filter yet? I'd want to see what comes out in the oil. Cut open your filter too to see what's in there.

Scott

Yes changed oil twice. Nothing in the filter except same metal residue as was in oil sample.

The UOA doesn't look unusual.

Has the cam sprocket been put on back to front causing that chain to be misaligned?

I think you have to start disassembling until you find and rectify the real cause.

No, it was installed correctly.
Understand that we will probably need to disassemble, just trying to get some help understanding the Analysis.

In terms of the analysis:
copper 7, Iron 3, Aluminum 2, Lead 1, Silicon 2,
Sodium 122, Molybdenum 46, Calcium 2197,Magnesium 23, Zinc 859

The numbers are in PPM or parts per million, so 1 PPM is a tiny proportion and equivalent to 0.000001%.

The copper, iron, aluminium, lead and silicon readings are so small that it is possibly the same as what was in the oil bottle before you put it in the engine.

The sodium, moly, calcium, magnesium and zinc are deliberately mixed into the oil by the manufacturer and form part of the anti-foaming, anti-wear and detergent additives. Again not unusual for probably a API SN or similar classification engine oil.

There will be people on this forum who will hound you about using an oil that contains less than 1200PPM of zinc but that's a whole other story.

Because the oil analysis only recognise microscopic contaminations, the metal particles and chips you can see in the filter and elsewhere would not be measured in the analysis so that explains the difference between the very evident contamination and the low readings shown in the test report.

I hope I answered your question better this time.

Good luck with the disassembly.

Thank you very much, makes this old man feel a little better, certainly is helpful.
Now the next step.

Great forum folks, kind people, great knowledge base.
Congratulations.