Articles | Blackstone Laboratories

Building an RV-12 (Part 1)

Like probably most of you, I read aviation magazines, including Sport Aviation, the EAA’s contribution to general aviation flying. In the 30 years since I first subscribed, I have read countless stories about building airplanes. After all those years the stories run together in a blurred line but a few oft-repeated ideas stand out. They don’t say much about what it is like to spend a couple or possibly a dozen years of your life trying to assemble something that may fly. You pick up instead the thought that if you want to finish the job you’d better do something on the airplane every day.

I’m retired. I have time on my hands. I’ve gotten much like the guys who write about building airplanes. I’m getting long in the tooth. We live on a farm property built more than 100 years ago and there is always work to do on the property. But after living here seven years, a lot of the essential stuff has been done. I talked with my wife Kathy about building the airplane, mentioning the time element — maybe 700-900 hours, as suggested by the kit manufacturer.

Turns out those hours were for someone else. Me? I’m a slow guy. I can’t predict how long something is going to take until I do it. So neither Kathy nor I suspected that nearly two years from the time I picked up the first kit, I would still be lingering on the wings with the third kit waiting on me to open and inventory. I’m looking forward to that third kit. It is the part of the airplane with seats you can sit in and make airplane noises. It is also the part that the wings slide into and the rear fuselage rivets to, which will surely make the project look more like what I tell people it is.

The tools of the trade

I started out in the basement doing the most elemental work while remembering the tools of the trade I once worked with as an aspiring aviation mechanic. That was in school, not the real world. In the real world I didn’t remember as much as I thought. Thank goodness there is no welding or much fabrication with this kit. Van’s, the manufacturer, suggests they supply everything but the engine fluids and paint. I’ll take a minor exception to that. There is some fabrication.

There are a lot of tools required, few of them I already had. I bought tools piecemeal, suffering the waiting time for each to arrive, and then about halfway to where I am now, I read where Aviation Tool Company had a complete set of tools you will need at about half the cost I probably paid buying them one at a time. And yes, you really do need the exact tools Van’s recommends, not some dusty, rusty tool you have stored under your bench. I speak from experience: you can only fool yourself on this type of project.

Mistakes will be made

Van’s does an amazing job with their kits. They are exact. All the holes line up, even across the kits. The instructions are good, precise, and accurate. Written by engineers, you really need to pay attention to what is stated. Miss something and you will be rebuilding.

This attention to detail is not a natural thing. We tend to gloss over things, thinking we know what is being said and then moving on. But that won’t work for you on a Van’s kit. Read it. Read it. And read it again. Repeat as many times as necessary to fully understand what is being said. You will make mistakes¾everyone does. So I suppose there are no perfect airplanes. Maybe I should say there are no perfect homebuilt airplanes. It is up to the builder to decide if an error weakens the airframe. Being trained as an A&P mechanic, I think I have a fairly good feel for making that determination. Up to now any errors have been correctable and I’m confident when I test fly it there will be no problems.

I made a mistake on the vertical stabilizer, the first large piece I assembled. The last step to that part is bolting on the rudder hinges. The bolts suggested for the job would not go into the locking nut-plate holes I had riveted on the inside of the spar. I could not believe it. I called Van’s. The guy I talked with led me to understand the error, which was going to require drilling out a bunch of rivets to get down to the spar, drilling out the countersunk 3/32” rivets and riveting the right nutplates to the spar. No harm done, but it cost me a few days’ work.

So I’ve had to back up a few times but I’ve learned to read these plans better. I think harder on things before proceeding. A friend said he needed to build an airplane so he had a place to focus his thoughts. That’s a good description of what the building is like. It gets intense. Time flies.

You need space

When I started the wings I had to move out to the garage. They run about 15 feet, though nearly 4 feet of the inboard spars overlap in the cockpit behind the seats. There wasn’t enough room in my short-guys basement to get the wings built. It was fall when the wings arrived, so I was thinking about winter. I have a fine garage, but no one ever thought about heating it so far as I can determine.

I spent October insulating and installing heat in the garage. Even with that, the warmth is minimal. When it really gets cold, down around 10 degrees F, I have to find something else to do. I can’t tell you how many times my airplane building has been interrupted. I only thought I could build an airplane without a bunch of additional work to provide a good workspace (first the basement, then the garage).

All in all I’m happy with what I’ve put together so far. The RV-12 looks like a small Cherokee, though two seats instead of four. The wings are about the same, using the Hershey Bar design. This airplane is light, maybe 800 pounds including the engine, which may go more than 300 pounds. It’s stick-flown so I would expect it to be twitchy, especially in pitch. But Van’s says no. It is sensitive, maybe, but not twitchy. I’m looking forward to finding out. Maybe by next summer I will get this airplane built.

By Jim Stark|2024-09-18T14:13:13-04:00July 18, 2023|Aircraft, Articles|Comments Off

Oil Filter Inspection

Routine oil filter inspections are a useful tool in the aircraft owner’s diagnostic toolbox. We use spectrometers to test for metals on a microscopic level, smaller than you can see and smaller than an engine’s oil filter will remove from the oil. Larger pieces of metal that might not show up in spectral testing will be trapped in the oil filter. By checking the filter at each oil change, you’ll get a good idea of what normal is for your engine and be able to quickly identify any changes that might be the early signs of a problem.

Cutting the housing

In order to inspect the filter pleats, they must first be removed from the housing. While a hacksaw or angle grinder might get you there, we strongly recommend using a filter cutter to remove the lid of the filter housing. A filter cutter cleanly cuts the robust steel housing without producing metal shavings that might find their way onto the filter pleats you are about to examine. Plus, who doesn’t like a good specialty tool?

The AFC-470 from Airwolf Filter Corp is our go-to cutter here at the lab: http://www.airwolf.com/aw/products/oil-filter-cutter. This tool fits the filter from any Lycoming or Continental engine we’ve come across. Airwolf also offers a smaller cutter for Rotax engine filters. For those who might also want to examine filters from other engines, like their car or truck, filter cutters that cover a wider range of filter sizes are available from speed shops such as Summit Racing. (https://www.summitracing.com/parts/sum-900511)

Secure the filter lug in a bench vice. If the filter doesn’t have a lug, you can secure the lower section of the filter housing in the vice – just be careful to not crush the housing or it may trap the internal cartridge with the filter pleats. Poking a hole in the housing to allow oil to drain can also trap the internal cartridge, so we recommend avoiding that as well.
Place the filter cutter on the filter and gently tighten the cutting wheel. We like to take a conservative approach in cutting the housing, progressively tightening the cutting wheel over a few rotations, rather than trying to cut through in one pass.
Once the lid has been cut, the cartridge with pleats can be removed from the housing. It is also good to inspect the inside of the filter housing for metallic particles and other debris that may not be trapped in the filter pleats.

Removing pleats from the cartridge

You have two options at this point. You can use a solvent such as mineral spirits to wash debris from the pleats, leaving the cartridge assembly intact. The resulting solvent/debris slurry is then filtered for examination. In our experience, this flushing method may not always remove all of the debris from the filter pleats. We prefer to cut the filter pleats from the cartridge for examination by the following method.

Disclaimer: There is the potential to guillotine a finger or two during this process. Proper technique greatly reduces the chances of extensive cursing and an unplanned trip to the local emergency room.

Place the filter cartridge horizontally on the bench and hold with your non-dominant hand. Locate the filter pleat seam that adjoins the two ends, usually with a metal band or glue.
Hold the knife with your knuckles against the bench for stability. Starting at the seam and using only downward force, cut along the edge of the pleats opposite the side you are holding. We prefer to rotate the pleats into the knife blade, firmly holding the knife in a fixed position. This method, when done properly, protects your off-hand’s fingers from the knife blade, where the knife moves downward into the bench if it were to slip.
Flip the cartridge around and repeat steps 1-3 on the other side. You may have to make a few passes on each side to fully cut the pleats. Using a new razor blade helps.
Again locate the seam where the two ends of the filter pleats are joined together. Cut across the pleats on either side of the seam.
The pleats can now be removed for examination. If properly cut, the pleats will come out in one long piece with a clean edge on both sides.
The pleats will still contain a fair amount of oil at this point, making it difficult to see metallic debris. If time allows, you can place the pleats on paper towels to drain overnight. You can also squeeze the pleats like an accordion and mop up the oil that squeezes out with paper towels.

Inspecting the pleats and basic identification of common particles

Stretch the pleats out under a bright light or outside on a sunny day. Larger metal slivers will be obvious, but you may have to look quite closely to identify smaller particles. Here at the lab, we have a dedicated space with clamps that stretch the filter pleats out in one long section. You can improvise in the shop by placing something heavy on both ends of the pleats.

A strong magnet (covered with a plastic baggie or cling wrap) will remove ferrous particles from the pleats. We also suggest checking the pleats themselves with a magnet. Severe steel wear may generate enough small ferrous particles to make the pleats react to magnet.
Aluminum has a bright, silver appearance and will not react to a magnet.
Copper-containing alloys, such as brass or bronze, vary from a light straw to copper color and will not react to a magnet.
It is also common to find carbon, especially in the filters from turbocharged engines. Carbon is black, hard particles that can be broken apart between your fingers. A large amount of carbon might indicate excess blow-by, but what counts as excessive is unique to each engine. Regularly checking the oil filter will give you a good idea of how much carbon is normal for your engine. You might also find carbon with steel embedded in it, so it is good to check carbon particles with a magnet.
Small bits of sealer material may also be found, especially after repairs. We generally don’t worry about this sort of non-metallic debris.
You might also find lead deposits from fuel blow-by. These particles have a bright, foil-like appearance that can look very much like a metallic wear particle. These deposits can be distinguished from metallic wear by their soft and “smudgy” texture. It is worth mentioning that these deposits are not lead from the wearing surface of a crank or camshaft bearing.

Steel sliver

Aluminum flakes under magnification

Brass/bronze under magnification

Carbon deposit

Sealer material

Lead deposit

Evaluating Filter Debris/Conclusion

In some cases, a filter will contain so much metal that a looming problem is almost certain. But it is more often the case for the findings to land in an ambiguous gray area, where the severity of the metal is situationally dependent. You can expect to find some metal and other debris in the filter from a fresh overhaul, for example, where the same findings would be unusual in a routine filter inspection for that same engine at 500 hours since major.

Lycoming offers good guidance on the identification and evaluation of filter debris in Service Bulletin 480F. In our opinion, a lot of the information in that bulletin can also be applied to Continental engines. Blackstone also offers a filter and filter screen examination service as a compliment to oil analysis – but we recommend doing routine filter screenings yourself to get familiar with what’s normal for your particular engine. Save your money for flying — check your filter yourself!

Emergency!

Unless you rent just one plane a lot, you never really know about a rental plane. You would like to think that it sees careful maintenance all the time, and I’m sure most of them do, but as long as some other person is flying it, it could have problems lurking that don’t show up every flight. Like most pilots, I would like to own a plane someday — something I could fly a lot and get familiar with. Unfortunately, a Republic SeaBee isn’t in the cards right now, so I’ll be renting for the time being. That leaves the possibility for unknown problems lurking that have to be dealt with on the fly (so to speak).

Half power

For me, my first experience with a problem in a rental was actually during flight training. I was flying a Cessna 152 out of Fort Wayne International. I was just going up solo for some touch and go’s and on my first climb-out the engine went to about half power. Thankfully it stayed at half power and I was able to fly the pattern and land without incident.

When I got back in to the flight training building and told my instructor what happened, I got a sense that she didn’t believe me. And sure enough, when we both took it up, everything was fine. She mentioned something like, “I’ll bet there was water in the tanks” (I thought, No, I sumped the tanks and they were clean — I do work in a lab, dammit!) and that’s the last I heard about it. Of course, I was renting the plane, so I don’t know if it had happened before or after my incident, or if something was fixed afterwards that may have been the cause.

In any case, I didn’t panic and made a nice landing (the plane was reusable) so really didn’t think much about it until several years later.

When suddenly…

I have had my private pilot’s license for a few years now, and I have been renting a 172N with the Continental O-300. I got checked out in it just fine and had taken a few flights previously by myself. On this particular day, I went up with my Dad (Jim Stark, Blackstone’s founder) and his wife on a sightseeing trip.

We flew north for about 30 minutes looking at the lakes of northeast Indiana, and we had just finished a turn south to head back when the engine started shaking. No little shudder either, but the kind of shaking a dog would make trying to pass razorblades — at least what I would imagine a dog would look like. My dog was never so dumb as to eat razorblades to start with.

Anyway, the engine started shaking really bad. My father (also a pilot) initially said “Get the carb heat on!” and I thought, of course! Carb heat! Continentals are prone to carb ice and I have had nightmares of having to force land an aircraft for just that reason. I’m not sure if I would have thought of that myself, so I was sure glad to have him sitting in the right seat.

I pulled on the carb heat so hard I thought the knob might come off. We sat expectantly for a minute, both waiting for the engine to smooth out. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. We still had power, but the shaking was bad enough that the thought of a 30-minute flight back to Fort Wayne wasn’t appealing, so I looked at Dad and said, “We’re going back to Angola to land!”

Angola is a town about as close to the northeast corner of Indiana that you can get. It has a beautiful airport with a paved 5,000-foot east-west runway. We were only about five minutes away, but as you can imagine, it seemed to take about an hour to get there.

The carb heat was on the whole time yet the engine never smoothed out, so I figured the engine had some serious issues. The landing was uneventful and as we pulled up to the ramp the engine was still shaking, so we decided to do a mag check.

The right mag check produced no change, but the engine almost died on the left mag. We tested this several times to make sure it was correct and then shut the engine down. One of the best things about the Angola airport is they have an airport car that’s available for situations just like this. It was a late ’90s Ford Explorer that shook almost as bad as the airplane, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

I called the FBO where I rented the plane, told them the situation, and then drove home. After an hour’s drive, I pulled into the FBO, gave them the keys and paid my bill. Yes, full price for the time I had the airplane. No discounts for having to make an emergency landing and no allowance for my stepmother needing new underwear. It was okay though, I was just happy to be alive and back in Fort Wayne.

The bright side

Now, the good thing about renting an airplane is, when it breaks, all you have to do is say “Your plane is messed up” and leave. I don’t worry about having to schedule/pay the mechanic, call the people who were renting it afterwards and tell them to make other plans, no hangar fees, no insurance, no fixing knobs that got pulled off.

The bad part about it is that you really never get to know the aircraft and engine ¾ what’s normal operation and what’s not. After a few days, I get a call from the FBO manager who said the engine had a stuck valve. I was fairly amazed because I suspected the horrible mag check denoted something electrical as the problem.

We happened to be doing the oil analysis on this engine, so I checked that to see what it looked like. Aside from a little excess copper, it looked pretty good. However, the O-300 does have bronze exhaust valve guides, so this should have been a warning, at least to be on the lookout for valve problems.

Signs of the problem

Since this incident, I have learned that a really bad mag check is a common symptom of a stuck valve. Some other common symptoms are below.

Morning sickness — When an engine starts rough first time consistently, not just in the morning, without plug fouling
Temporary roughness on climb out or in cruise — this happens when a valve momentarily sticks, then shakes loose
Intermittent rough idle that’s not caused by carb ice (this needs to be ruled out)

If I had been the sole operator of this aircraft, I might have identified some of the other symptoms and put two and two together. Instead, I was not aware of any issues at all. In all fairness, maybe there weren’t any, I don’t know. But I know these symptoms now and I’ll be sure to look for them in the future.

By Ryan Stark|2024-09-18T14:17:40-04:00July 18, 2023|Aircraft, Articles|Comments Off

Building an Engine Dehumidifier

Continental and Lycoming typically rate their engine life from 1,600 to 2,000 hours of operation between overhauls on most models. However, the only owners likely to achieve that kind of rated performance are those who use their aircraft on a nearly daily basis. Why? The reason is not the flying. It’s the parking!

A primary culprit for premature aircraft engine overhaul is corrosion caused by condensation that occurs after shutdown. Aircraft engines that are used daily frequently reach their rated TBO because liquid condensate is boiled off on a regular basis. Low use rate often results in reduced engine life.

Air Inlet Fitting In Oil Filler Cap

As the engine cools and the internal temperature drops below the dew point, liquid moisture condenses out of the vapor and clings to internal engine surfaces. This liquid water then resumes its ongoing process of eating up your engine from the inside out. However, if the dew point can be made sufficiently low, then liquid water will never form. This engine dehumidifier provides a continuous positive pressure injection of extremely dry air (dew point approximately -100^oF) on a 24/7 continuous flow basis. It is recovered at the crankcase blow-by vent, returned to the pump, dried again and re-injected in the oil fill port of the engine.

How it works

The dehumidifier is connected the engine as soon after engine shutdown as possible, before the engine cools. It is then run on a 24/7 basis. A small aquarium-type air pump forces ambient humid air though plastic bottle containing silica gel (this is the stuff used in shipping and storing aircraft engines and electronics).

Air Fitting For Oil Cap

The silica gel has a great affinity for moisture and literally sucks it out of the air. The dried air is filtered and injected into the engine crankcase. Any moisture inside the engine vaporizes with the incoming dry air and is moved by the constant positive pressure from the air pump to the crankcase blow-by vent, then back to the pump and the silica gel dryer. At some point in time, the silica gel will absorb all the moisture it can hold. This is obvious because about 5% of silica gel crystals are dyed blue that changes to a pinkish color when saturated with moisture. At that point:

Remove the saturated silica gel from the bottle
Spread it out on a cookie sheet
Heat in oven at 275^o F until the silica turns blue again
Cool and return to the bottle

Disassembled air pump. Remove the felt
filter in the bottom of the pump and plug
the hole with glue.

The frequency of this recycle rate will depend up the humidity of the environment. This may vary from months or more in dry regions down to just a week or so in the humid southeastern United States. Adding more silica gel to the bottle will extend the service interval.

Build your own

Connect the drier output via Tygon plastic tubing to the engine oil filler cap. A return line of Tygon tubing is fitted to the crankcase blow-by port. The preferred means of connection is to drill a ¼” hole in the oil filler cap and then install a short standpipe to the cap. I modified the oil filler cap by installing a hollow ¼”-20 carriage bolt. (I used a lathe to cut off the threads on the leading ½” of the bolt. This permits a slip fit of the Tygon dry air supply hose.)

The hollow bolt was then installed on the oil fill cap. Additionally, I made a ¼”-20 threaded Delrin plastic plug to cap this little standpipe during flight. Also, you will need to make an adapter to fit the crankcase blow-by tube. This can be a rubber stopper drilled to fit the Tygon return hose or a piece of rubber tubing with the return Tygon tube hot glued into it.

Please note that you will have to also devise a plug for the freeze-emergency blow-by vent located few inches up the blow-by vent pipe inside the aircraft engine nacelle. This can be a rubber flapper that normally closes the freeze vent. If the blow-by tube is frozen shut, crankcase pressure will push the rubber flap open.

The dehumidifier components consist of:

A vibrating reed “silent” type aquarium air pump
Two-liter plastic pop bottle with screw on cap
Airstone aquarium air bubbler
Ten feet of 1/8″ bore Tygon plastic aquarium tubing
Twelve inches of 3/16″ outside diameter (1/8″ inside diameter) rigid plastic tubing
One pound of 5% blue dyed silica gel
¼-20 custom air fitting hollow bolt
Pump air intake tube

Note: Low-cost aquarium pumps do have an irritating 60 Hz buzz caused by their vibrating reed design. So-called “silent” pumps are the same design but are supported in a manner that will minimize noise. If you spend a lot of time in the hangar, I strongly recommend the “silent” type pump.

To construct the dehumidifier, you will need an X-acto knife, a drill and ¼” and 3/16” drill bits, a hot glue gun, and gel super glue.

Extending the dessicant recycle time

The following modification can extend the intervals between service times for the desiccant. It revamps the dryer cycle from an open- loop system into a closed-loop. Dry air is still injected as before into the oil filler neck, but in addition, a vacuum line is attached to the crankcase blow-by tube that returns dry air back through the engine. This eliminates the continuous drying of external incoming humid air into the system and provides for continuous circulation of ever-drier air in the crankcase.

Implementation

The air pump must be converted to a blow-and-suck configuration. To do this you will need to make an additional fitting for the air intake port next to the air output port on the pump. Drill a 3/16” hole about ½” to the right of the exhaust port. Remove the felt filter in the belly of the pump case and plug the hole with glue.

Pump Return Line Installed In Blow By Port

To work as a vacuum pump, the pump case must be made airtight. This is done by disassembling the air pump case (two screws) and applying RTV silicon aquarium cement around the entire case seam and around all four sides of the power cord strain relief. Then reassemble the case and allow it to dry. Also, add RTV glue to any screw heads or tape over recess holes in the case bottom for an airtight seal.

You will also need to make an adapter fitting such as a rubber hose or rubber stopper fitted with a length of the Tygon tubing to serve as an air return to the pump.

Fabrication

Drill two 3/16” holes about ¼”off the center in the top of the bottle cap, close enough to the center to allow easy tube clearance of the bottle neck interior wall. For the pump inlet input, insert a 2” length of the rigid tubing in one hole and hot glue it into place. Insert the remaining 10” rigid tube in the other hole and hot glue it so the bottom end of the tube is positioned about 2″ from the bottom of the bottle.

Use a 1″ length of the Tygon flex tube to connect the aquarium bubbler airstone to the end of the longer rigid tubing. The Airstone is used as a dust filter to keep silica gel particles out of the engine. The airstone should lie on the bottom of the bottle.

To prep the silica gel, it in your kitchen oven at 275^oF until the dyed silica gel pellets turn blue (they are pinkish when saturated with moisture). Open the bag and pour the contents into a clean and dry two-liter pop bottle. Insert the airstone/tube assembly, work the airstone to the bottom of the silica gel, and tighten the cap. Do not delay, as it will absorb moisture from the air.

Open-loop dryer assembly

Use about a foot of the Tygon tubing to plumb the air pump to the short air input stub. Connect 6 feet or more of Tygon tubing to the airstone-equipped exit port, then to the air fitting on the oil filler cap. Connect the pump return line to the crankcase breather port via an airtight rubber seal.

Note: All connections and seals must be a leak-tight fit. Mating via the crankcase blow-by vent tube (usually located near the firewall) may be done by inserting a piece of the rigid tubing through a 3/4” closed-cell-foam ball or a tightly fitting rubber stopper.

A secondary modification required is a plug for the freeze slot in the blow by tube. This can be a rubber flap around the blow-by pipe that is normally closed over the freeze slot, but is pushed open by crankcase pressure if the exit end of blow-by tube end should freeze shut. Finally, a foam plug fitted to your aircraft’s air intake with a “REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT” flag attached will close up the system circulation (in the case of a crankshaft position that leaves an intake valve open).

By Ryan Stark|2024-09-18T14:19:35-04:00July 18, 2023|Aircraft, Articles|Comments Off

Annual Inspection

Well, the building is over and my RV-12 is in the air. Now that I’ve got an airplane I can actually use to go places and have fun, life is a bit less hectic. Still, the fun has to stop sometime and for airplane owners, the opposite of fun is often the annual inspection. Since my aircraft is an experimental, I have to do what’s known as a condition inspection. There is maybe less paperwork involved than the annual inspection that certified aircraft have to go through, but the potential for pain is there. To be clear, this inspection is an extremely important thing to do and the pain will often be limited to just a lack of flying, though there is always the possibility that a major repair will be needed and then the pain can quickly spread to your wallet.

Inspection #2

I am actually on my second condition inspection. The first one was done in July of 2021 and it went really well. The airplane was new (only 26 hours on it), so there really weren’t any issues involving worn-out parts and other things that older aircraft have to deal with. Nope, just checking to make sure everything was working properly and all the fasteners were still holding fast.

This year has been different, but it’s not really the plane’s fault. My wife and I started the inspection in mid-July, when the weather was nice and there was still plenty of year left, but didn’t get it completely done until just last weekend (the end of January). Again, the plane is still fairly new (only at 46 hours now), so there really weren’t that many problems to address. No, this year the problem was with me. Life and work tend to have a way of keeping you busy and this year it’s been a struggle to string a few weeks together to do the inspection.

DIY maintenance

As many of you with experimental aircraft know, one of the perks of building an airplane is getting to do all of your own maintenance. No more having to find a mechanic and work around their schedule or pay their bills. The other side of the coin is, you have to do all your own maintenance. In fact, there isn’t a mechanic in this area that will touch an experimental aircraft, so I couldn’t hire this job out even if I wanted to. Thankfully, the work itself is pretty simple overall and the nice thing is there is a checklist to follow. These are printed in the maintenance manual and include a systematic checklist of everything that needs to be looked at.

I don’t think you have to be especially mechanically inclined or talented to do this job yourself, but a little mechanical knowledge probably helps. I took a 2-day class in Dallas to get a repairman certificate with an inspection rating. It was full of good information, but possibly the most important thing they did was show all the many ways people can die as a result of taking shortcuts and not following the checklist. By the time I was done with that class, I was fairly gripping the chair arms with white-knuckled fists, and ready to triple check to make sure I dotted all my i’s and crossed all my t’s.

Oil change at annual

The checklist has all kinds of things on it, and I can see how it might be tempting to skip something that seems unnecessary. One of the things on that checklist is normally an oil change. This is a standard part of most annuals and often times it’s done whether the oil actually needs changed or not. We see short-run samples like this all the time at Blackstone and often wonder if the owner is looking for a problem, or if the plane is just in for annual and this was on the list.

In my mind, if there was any one item on the inspection checklist that could be skipped, it would be an oil change that’s not needed (Blackstone’s lawyers would like to remind you that this is one man’s opinion only; officially, Blackstone advises you to follow the checklist!). Still, with that being said, an oil change is really an excellent diagnostic tool. You can send in an oil sample to see if the engine is wearing poorly and cut open the oil filter to see if it has any visual metal present. The problem with a short-run sample is, we can rarely tell the customers a lot other than there wasn’t much metal in the oil, so it looks okay from what we can see.

Unless you suspect a problem, a short-run filter inspection would also be of minimal value, for the same reason—there really isn’t enough time for any significant metal to accumulate. So how about a situation where you are halfway through a typical oil change? Where you have enough time on the oil for an analysis to tell you something, but not enough time that the oil really needs to be changed? For situations like that, you might want to get an oil sample by pulling one up via the dipstick tube. We sell a pump for just that purpose. It’s reusable and the money you’d save on an unnecessary oil change would likely pay for the pump in pretty short order.

Sampling from the filter

Or, what might be an even better option is to just change the oil filter at that point. Then you can pour an oil sample right from the filter and still cut it open to look for metal. If you do follow this route, just let us know you got the oil sample from the filter. We might see a little more insoluble (solid) material in this situation, but the metals and all other results should be basically the same as if you got the oil as it was draining out of the sump.

We understand there might be some situations where it’s not possible to stray from the checklist and it’s just easier to dump the oil and start fresh, though if you have some leeway in that regard, skipping an oil change can save some time and money, making a potentially painful job a little less so.

By Ryan Stark|2024-09-18T14:20:13-04:00July 18, 2023|Aircraft, Articles|Comments Off

Under Pressure! (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this saga, our flying club’s newly installed O-360 lost oil pressure in flight with a student pilot at the controls. After a brief landing then an immediate a go-around (you read that right), and a fair amount of sweat and tears – but fortunately no blood – we found the engine had digested an errant paper towel, which was blocking the suction screen.

Crud in the pan

The hard part begins

Now that we knew the engine actually did suffer a loss of oil pressure (it wasn’t just the gauge) and the filter analysis showed that some damage had been done, our next step was to figure how to proceed.

We consulted as many experts as we could and received suggestions ranging from “just go fly it” to “pull a cylinder and look for damage” to “overhaul it” and everything in between. The jury was out, and we had to decide whose suggestion to follow.

Lycoming has a convenient Service Bulletin about what to do if you find metal in the oil filter, so we started there. Service Bulletin 480F suggested, based on the amount and size of metal in the oil filter, that we remove the oil pan and check for metal. That seemed like a good idea; not only were we still troubleshooting mechanical wear, but also, we didn’t know how much paper towel was still in the engine.

It took two solid days of work to remove, inspect, clean, and reinstall the oil sump, which still had paper towel in it. Once that was done, after finding no large pieces of metal in the sump and being sure there weren’t any leftover paper towels in the engine, we did a 30-minute ground run then drained the oil, and cut the filter to check for metal.

Intestinal fortitude

The oil analysis was unremarkable, but the oil filter report noted 10-15 non-ferrous metallic flakes per pleat with a few dozen larger pieces that had scrape marks on them. So – a little better than

Metal from the filter, magnified in analysis

before, but certainly not clean. But this was only a 30-minute ground run compared to the 20-some hour sample. Were the improvements from the shorter oil change, or an actual improvement? We didn’t know.

Now, I’ve been an analyst at Blackstone for over a decade. I’ve helped countless customers diagnose their own engine issues and told people to go fly it and check back. But there isn’t any amount of intestinal fortitude that prepares someone for the reality of experiencing a problem, diagnosing engine damage, doing what you can to fix it, and know that the next step is to go flying and see how it goes.

The two A&Ps on the field agreed that if we made it past the first 10 hours (if) without any oil pressure issues, then we should be fine. “But watch that oil pressure,” they cautioned.

Going up

We took all the precautions we could: we went up in pairs (so one person could watch the oil pressure), we selected calm days, affording us four runway options for an emergency landing, and we stayed within glide distance of the airport for 10 long hours.

I am glad to say that those first 10 hours were uneventful. Oil pressure remained strong, the engine ran great, and we had no issues. With each hour that passed, our confidence grew, so we eagerly sent another oil and filter sample for analysis, hoping for hard data to bolster our confidence.

The oil analysis was unremarkable, but the filter – not great. Approximately 30 variously sized non-ferrous flakes were present per pleat, along with one piece of steel.

Not what you want to see

This wasn’t what we were hoping for, but this oil run was 10 hours long as opposed to the previous 30-minute ground-run sample. There was bound to be more metal, right? Regardless, there was still more metal after 10 hours than there was in our previous 50-hour samples, so we weren’t in the clear yet.

Our solution? Do another 10-hour oil run for an apples-to-apples comparison. At this point, with 10 hours of uneventful flying under our belt, our confidence was starting to grow, so we ventured out a little from the airport environment. After 10 hours, we sent the oil and filter for analysis, fairly confident that this second sample would reveal the improvement that was bound to come.

Instead, we received the disheartening news that “the overall quantity and size of the non-ferrous flakes was similar to the previous filter.” Dang.

Hard discussions

We debated what to do next. Are we throwing money away on oil and filters when we might need an overhaul anyway? Do we keep wasting filters when the nationwide filter shortage might ground us anyway? Do we run 25 hours, despite not seeing an improvement in the metals?

We reconsidered an earlier suggestion to pull a cylinder and look for crank/bearing damage, but that might raise more questions than answers: what should a 1500-hour crank/bearing look like? How will we know if the damage is excessive without pulling all four cylinders and comparing? And at that point why not just overhaul?

Opinions varied among our club members. One thought we were overreacting and that a paper towel couldn’t cause engine damage. Others of us were more cautious, remembering how little metal our engine used to make in 50 hours. As a group, we exchanged some vibrant text conversations as we decided how to proceed.

With our concern about irreversible, ongoing damage, we opted to do another short 10-hour oil change to try and limit further damage and get another good comparison to gauge progress. I was afraid that if this sample didn’t come back cleaner, we’d start considering exploratory surgery and watch the summer tick by from the ground.

Baby steps

We knocked those 10 hours out in less than a week and had results early the following week. I jokingly told my coworker that I’d bribe him with beer if he gave us a good enough report that we wouldn’t have to ground the aircraft for the summer.

Still with the metal

As it turned out, no bribery was needed: the oil analysis came back clean and the filter report contained good news: less metal than before. Finally! Maybe everything was going to be okay. Granted, we’re not totally out of the woods yet – we’re still monitoring and we’re going to change the oil in 25 hours, but at least we’ve got data that suggests we’re past the worst of it. If the numbers are good in 25 hours, then we’ll try 50. That night of the improved report was the best night’s sleep I’d gotten in months.

Lessons learned

Hindsight is always 20/20, as they say, but looking back I think there are several lessons to be learned.

First, when you’re troubleshooting a problem, do your research and get as much data as you can. It honestly shocked me how many different opinions we received. At one point I called Lycoming. They called me back several days later, and after listening to my story the tech said we needed an overhaul.

I replied, “Well in the week I was waiting for you to get back to me, we did a 30-minute ground run, tested the oil and filter, and we’ve since flown a couple of uneventful hours, as per SB 480 and we’re planning on flying a total of 10 hours before retesting.”

He said, “Okay, that’s good. Do that and proceed as planned.”

In less than five minutes he went from telling me to overhaul to “go fly.” There’s a vast dichotomy there. I get that there’s a lot of liability in aviation, but that just makes it harder to make good, educated decisions. We did a lot of research, gathered data, and consulted with as many people as we could to make the best decision for us. Do your homework.

Second, remember that you have many tools in your toolbox for diagnosing problems. Our oil reports came back clean all along – it was the filter analysis that was showing metal. Oil analysis measures the microscopic particles in the oil; the filter/screen is where you’ll see visible metal. Always cut your filter open, and use oil analysis in conjunction with other tests (like borescope and compression checks). The more data you have, the better decision you can make.

Third, as we said last time – trust your gut. If your intuition tells you something is wrong, don’t ignore it. But the reverse is also true: after all those hours of flying the pattern with strong oil pressure, good RPMs, and normal oil temps, we had a strong feeling that our engine was going to be okay – we just had to wait a few oil changes for the data to support our intuition.

And last but certainly not least – keep the damn paper towels far away from your engine!

By Amanda Callahan|2024-09-18T14:21:50-04:00July 18, 2023|Aircraft, Articles|Comments Off

Under Pressure! (Part 1)

About a year ago I started a flying club at my local airport with three other pilots – that was a long and interesting process that I won’t go into here – but after a few months of trying to get the right people together then struggling to buy an airplane in a hot market, we were able to purchase a 1965 Cessna 172 F with the Air Planes 180hp Lycoming O-360-A4M upgrade, with about 1300 hours SMOH. The pre-buy inspection went well and I had the honor (with another member) of flying our new ship home to Illinois from Florida.

As a 12-year analyst at Blackstone Laboratories, of course I did an oil and filter analysis as part of the pre-buy inspection. With that data in hand and considering how active our new aircraft was, we decided to proceed with Lycoming-recommended 50-hour oil changes right off the bat.

The first few oil analysis reports were excellent, and the oil filters came back nice and clean. The first time we pulled the oil suction screen we found a small amount of fibrous material in it, but the previous owner confessed that they hadn’t ever pulled the screen, so we assumed the debris was probably years – if not decades – old. We didn’t worry too much about it. When the next screen came back clean, save for a mere spec of carbon, we forgot about the fibrous debris entirely and happily went about enjoying our new bird.

Lost oil pressure

That is… until March 29th, when one of our newer student pre-solo members texted that, 10 minutes after takeoff, the engine lost oil pressure. He and the instructor landed without incident and reported everything looked ok, hoping it was a bad gauge.

The questions from the other partners streamed in: where were you? How was the engine running? How was oil temperature? The student pilot clarified: they took off to the north, climbed to 5,000’ to work on maneuvers, and when they did the cruise checklist they noticed the low oil pressure. He reported returning to the airport immediately with no issue. The engine ran great the whole time, and oil temperature was fine. No apparent oil loss.

I was out having coffee with a friend at the time, but my heart sank and I couldn’t focus on anything else, so she and I ended up going to the airport, with an A&P friend on the phone to look for something obvious, like an oil leak at the oil pressure gauge or where the line comes through the firewall. I didn’t find anything, but I wasn’t too discouraged: I knew we had a lot of things to troubleshoot before suspecting engine damage, so I tried not to jump to any conclusions.

Filter pleats with slimy debris embedded

Initial shock and investigation

The following day, our club maintenance director – under the watchful eye of our A&P – started working through the troubleshooting list. We quickly determined it wasn’t the gauge, and it wasn’t the line, so the easy, cheap fixes were off the table.

Now concern was starting to mount; the deeper we had to dig, the deeper our pockets were going to have to be. We’re a new club, already operating on a shoestring budget, so we didn’t have time or money for costly repairs. But we had a problem to solve.

The next step in our troubleshooting process was to start looking for a problem. We drained the oil, pulling an oil sample in the process, and we removed, cut, and inspected the oil filter. The only abnormalities were some clumpy, slimy looking lumps (see figure 1) and a giant piece of carbon (figure 2). The carbon was large enough to wonder if something similar had gotten stuck in the oil pressure relief valve, so we pulled the oil pressure relief valve off hoping for a big piece of carbon to be our easy culprit.

Much to my dismay, the oil pressure relief valve was totally clean.

Looking at the screen

Later that night, with the oil drained, the filter cut and the oil pressure relieve valve not the suspect, I pulled the oil suction screen. My heart sank. The screen was completely blocked by fibrous

Debris on the end of a fingertip

material. It looked like the same stuff we found in our earlier oil change, only a whole lot more of it. The pickup screen was so caked full that I had to use a screwdriver to pry the debris out of the screen (figures 3a and 3b).

That’s when concern really started to set in: we actually did lose oil pressure, and there could be some serious damage here.

A few days later the oil analysis and official filter report came back: the oil report was unremarkable, but the oil filter report was disheartening. Our engine had gone from making “no appreciable metal” in 50-hour oil change intervals to making “non-ferrous metallic flakes at an approximate rate of 20 pieces per filter pleat” in a matter of 20 hours. Great. Now what?

Fact-finding

The filter report stirred up more questions than it did answers. The next step in the process was to figure out how much damage was done, what that fibrous material was, how it got there, how much remained, and, most importantly, what to do next?

The fibrous material turned out to be the easiest question to answer – it was a paper towel. When examined under a microscope, it had the very distinctive dimpled pattern you see on “quilted” paper towels (see figure 4). Once we identified the contaminant, the next step was figuring out how it got there.

Fluffy stuff that came out of the suction screen

Interestingly enough, the previous owners provided the answer in the photographs they shared with me during the pre-buy. A couple of photos showed the process of swapping the original O-300 with the O-360. In figure 5 you can see a couple of paper towels sticking out the back of the engine where the magnetos should be. I believe that some (or all) of that paper towel somehow ended up getting stuck in the engine – either someone turned the prop and the gears pulled it in, or some of it got wet with engine oil and broke off into the engine.

**You did what?**

There’s another interesting twist to this story: as we were trying to figure out how long the engine ran with no oil pressure, we looked at the flight track on FlightAware. As reported, the plane took off to the north, climbed to about 5,000’ turned around then did a 360’ turn, presumably to lose altitude. Then there’s a normal approach to landing and…a go-around.

Wait, what?

That’s right – a go-around. With no oil pressure measuring on the gauge. When we confronted the CFI about the flight track, he confirmed: the student pilot was flying, and he came in too high and too fast to salvage the landing, so a go-around was initiated. *face palm*

Why didn’t the CFI take control of that flight and land? Because he assumed it was a gauge problem. Oil temp was fine, the engine was running well, so he didn’t worry about it.

Ground up paper towel under a microscope

The good news was that the CFI confirmed that oil pressure wasn’t lost entirely (as the student pilot had reported). It was only lost when at idle. If there was some power, there was some (albeit not much) oil pressure reading on the gauge. With that information, and knowing the engine hadn’t seized entirely, we were hopeful the engine damage was limited.

Moving forward

So, we’ve finally found the culprit, and now the long road to recovery begins. The main takeaway from this part of the story is, if you see anything unusual at all – anything – get on the ground as soon as possible. Don’t assume a low oil pressure reading is a bad gauge, and don’t fly when something might be wrong. Don’t dilly-dally, waiting for traffic to clear. Declare an emergency if you have to and diagnose with two feet firmly planted on terra firma.

Check back in the next newsletter as we discuss the confusing, gut-wrenching process of figuring out whether we could salvage the engine!

By Amanda Callahan|2024-09-18T14:22:01-04:00July 14, 2023|Aircraft, Articles|Comments Off

Tales From the Oily Side

My business card says “Founder.” It’s not a title, but more of a boast, an inside joke. I’ve had all the titles a man could want and as I settle into the long, hopefully comfortable ride toward the end of this long, challenging and exciting life, the word Founder on my business card describes the business activity I am most proud of.

Is this a great country or what? Where else can a guy start with nothing and create something? There isn’t any paved, well-lighted path to business creation, but there are no barriers to prevent anyone from doing it either. This is a story about creating a business. It would have been helpful to be a genius, or rich, or to have powerful backing. I didn’t have any of those things but I still managed to get the job done. I can attest to surviving many great risks and difficulties in the past two decades, and we’re still standing, hale and hardy. Part of the reason we survived was just luck. Part of it was having a good idea. Part of it was refusing to quit when any reasonable man would have. All of it was a hoot! I’m the Founder. I started it. I believe in it.

The beginning of Blackstone

In the beginning I was sitting in a lawyer’s office in August 1985, incorporating Blackstone Laboratories. My wife was a full-time student at a private college and worked part time. We had some residual savings and stocks from past jobs, but after a month and a half of no employment, I was essentially broke. I was starting a laboratory business that I knew would be capital-intensive, with no capital. I had no clientele, no reputation as a businessman, and no place to open the doors. I was as alone as a guy could be and needed a lot of luck.

A lot of luck was awaiting me. Without it I would just have been another hapless hopeful with his shirttail hanging out, having lost his house, and returning to the dismal task of finding a real job in the world of work.

Incorporating Blackstone Laboratories was probably the most outrageous thing I have intentionally done. It made perfectly good sense to me and no sense to anyone else. My idea was to take oil analysis out of the full-service petroleum laboratory business and, concentrating solely on that one function, do it better, faster, and cheaper than anyone else. Ray Krok did it with the hamburger when he created McDonald’s. I wanted to do the same with oil analysis.

There are (I now realize) some obvious differences between Ray Krok’s idea and mine. When he started McDonald’s, Krok was already a successful businessman and had money and influential friends. His market was everyone who liked hamburgers, which includes nearly everyone on the planet. Even with all of this going for him, his journey into new business creation was not an easy one. Bankers, for instance, were reluctant to loan him money. At that time, there was no business category for “fast food.” To them, Krok was a restaurateur, but didn’t fit the mold for that type of business. They say there was a time that you could have bought half interest in McDonald’s for $50,000.

Good fortune

I could not have survived my early beginnings with Blackstone Laboratories without good fortune smiling on me. Early on, I was sitting in my back yard working on my business plan when who should mosey down my driveway, but my long-lost brother from Wyoming. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked. Bob was a graduate engineer beating the bushes for a new job, having recently been separated from a nice income by a West Coast power company. He pulled up a lawn chair. Sitting there beneath a maple tree on a fine, late summer afternoon, I outlined my plan for conquering the world with a better, faster, cheaper oil analysis program. He was off to Louisiana for a job interview and was thinking about visiting Alaska after that for the same reason. His parting words, as he made the trip back up the driveway was, “If you get the money, let me know. I might want to throw in with you.”

If Ray Krok had trouble with bankers, you can imagine the uphill battle I was facing. Bankers at least knew what hamburgers were. “Oil analy…what?”

The morning of the appointment to sign for the loans, I was sitting at the foot of my bed on a hope chest. As I was pulling on my socks, I realized my feet were ice cold. I was 42 years old and I thought surely, by now, I was past the point that I could come up “chicken” about any experience. Sure enough, I was literally experiencing cold feet. Once I signed those notes — along with my wife of the time, who took the plunge right along with me — I was embarking on this journey for real. The only possible outcomes were abject failure and bankruptcy, success, or death.

I got the initial loans approved for Blackstone not because of my brilliant business plan, my dazzling footwork, or my good looks. I got the money — far short of what I needed, I might add — because one of my neighbors was a commercial loan officer for a local bank. Why he was willing to go out on a limb for me I can’t tell you. Normally, bankers are not that adventurous.

Starting sales

Nothing happens in a new business until someone sells something. Just short of three months from the first day I began working on Blackstone Laboratories, we opened the doors in 600 square feet of rental space. About 80% of the loan money had been spent on new equipment and building renovation. Bob had come in with me, and with the help of many volunteers we fashioned a functioning laboratory and hung out our shingle. But wait! We didn’t have any oil samples to run. Money was flowing out fast enough, but nothing was coming back in.

Along with all the other activities of the past three months, I had been putting together a potential client list. At that time there were only a few places in our local business area that used oil analysis. Users typically had large diesel engines, critical factory machinery, or airplanes. Today, with everyone beginning to realize the importance of oil analysis, the market is vast. When we started you could list all the client possibilities within fifty miles of driving distance on one pack of index cards.

I called most of the “possibles” and made an appointment with anyone who would talk with me. The market greeted the coming of a new oil analysis company in town with little enthusiasm. During that first three months I didn’t actually have anything to sell. I built the potential client list by asking the question, “If I get my oil analysis business opened by November 1 and I can offer you the best oil analysis program on the planet at no more cost than you are paying now, will you consider using it?” That was a fair question that was hard to say no to. When they said yes, as most of them did, it gave me the perfect opportunity to set up the second appointment. But it didn’t get me any sure clients.

Money flows out of a business as steady as a beating drum. In order to survive you have to somehow match that outflow with income. While that may be intuitively obvious, it is a rude awakening when, after opening the doors of a new business you suddenly become aware that with each passing moment you are bleeding away your liquidity and have nothing coming in to replace it.

Just in case someone should actually call us or drop in, Bob stayed at the office. I went out to sell.

There was a semi-trailer manufacturer in town that had a garage to service their semis. The facility was Quonset huts of varying sizes attached together. I had visited several times and was certain they were going to buy our service. An unusual aspect of the place was this: to get from the smaller office Quonset hut to the larger one in which their maintenance work was done, you had to pass through the men’s rest room.

On the day I was to close the sale, Bob was along so I could show him the ropes. We met with the maintenance manager in the office. After a brief discussion the manager got up saying, “Well, if you want to work with us, come on” and headed into the men’s rest room. I started to follow when Bob grabbed my arm. “Wait a minute,” he said, “we don’t need business that bad!”

Working without pay

In the beginning, all the shoe leather I could spend didn’t produce thirty new clients in two months of dedicated work. Because we didn’t take credit cards, all the work we did manage to procure was with businesses that had to be billed. The invoice terms were net-30 but payments tended to arrive 45 to 60 days from the invoice date. I could only get invoices typed once a month. After our grand opening at the start of November, we didn’t achieve any cash flow income until after Christmas that first year. By Christmas I was flat broke. I had to go over to Bob’s house one evening and confess. The bank account was tapped out. There would be no more paychecks until we got business rolling. “Think it over. Are you willing to come back to work January 2 with no income? In or out…let me know.”

Bob stayed. For the next year payday became a function of finding ways to pay bills with little to no income. I personally borrowed from every source possible until eventually no one would lend me any more. It took a year of hard selling to get enough income to pay bills even without payroll. Sometime during the second year of operations we managed to eke out enough to pay Bob and myself $100 a month.

Entering the computer age

As sales increased, so did the physical requirements of typing reports and invoices. Bob ran the samples. I took care of nearly everything else. We reached the point of sixteen oil samples a day sometime in the second year. We had no computers and no money to buy any. If I started typing reports at 1:00, I could produce the sixteen (perfect) reports by 10:00 that night. The reports were three -part NCR paper, so any typos meant I had to start over typing a new report. My typing skills left a lot to be desired.

Late in the second year a mildly rotund gentleman with a round beaming face strolled in our front door. He was starting a new computer hardware/software company and needed business. I needed a computer and a program to run it. We made a deal. With his help, we managed to build a functioning computer system that could produce a perfect Blackstone oil report. It multiplied my report capabilities several times over. When we added the invoice function the following year, we had a system that could comfortably produce fifty reports a day.

The poor years

I come from a family of seven children. We grew up without having much other than the community of family closeness. In his autobiography, Ray Charles speaks of poverty: “Poverty knits people together. Affluence has the opposite effect.” Being desperately broke in the early years of the company’s development and working closely with Bob had a familiar ring to it. We were certainly a nonprofit business without having the tax benefit of being such. Business grew slowly, though we were never without things to do. One of the problems was neither of us could get any time away from the business. He didn’t have many oil samples to run, but they needed to be run every day. I had to be on the property every day to report the data and take care of the other aspects of running a business. Typing reports usually happened late in the day, after being on the road selling all morning and afternoon. Bob decided we needed another person so we could get the occasional day off.

Sometime in the second year, my brother John started hanging around the lab. Bob, who couldn’t stand to see idle hands, put John to work. John had sick leave income so was doing better financially than the two of us. He learned one lab job, and then another. He eventually was running the lab, freeing Bob up to do other things, including getting the new computer system up and functioning. For a while, John’s appearance was spotty, sometimes working at a factory, sometimes at Blackstone.

Then one fine fall morning, John showed up at Blackstone to work full time. While we needed the help, there was no money to pay him. We were not in any position to put anyone on the payroll since we really had no payroll. But John was family and was showing faith in what we were trying do to, so I welcomed him to the operation and tried to figure out how we were going to support him.

During the first year of operations I had invested several thousand dollars in Blackstone. Most of it was borrowed. Our revenue had grown to the point that I drawing some of that money back from the company and was getting some of the loans off my back. In order to support John I simply diverted the loan payment money to him for income.

Driving beaters

John had always driven “beaters” for transportation. When something, anything, went wrong with one of them, he would simply abandon it and buy another. Anything that was transportation was okay with him . When he started at Blackstone he was driving a rusted out AMC Hornet. The company bought me a Jeep pickup truck since I had to be on the road selling and my problem-ridden Jaguar had died. John’s Hornet died so I gave him the company pickup to drive and bought another Jeep, an aging Wagoneer from a car lot.

The only reliable set of wheels between the three of us was the Jeep pickup. When either Bob or I broke down, John would get the call to tow us in. Having had the experience of being on the strap behind John once in my life, I had no desire to do it a second time. Towing is a two-person function if it is to be done safely and successfully. With John up front you were sort of on your own. It wasn’t that he forgot you were back there. He would simply set off and navigate traffic as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

Returning from a late fall, family campout in southern Indiana, Bob suffered an electrical failure in his wife’s aging Toyota fifty miles short of home. John got the call. He found Bob along the berm of the northbound interstate lanes. John hooked Bob up to the strap and lit out in a cloud of dust. Everything went well until John swung out to pass a semi tractor-trailer rig at highway speeds. When Bob steered left to follow, the steering locked since he had forgotten to turn on the ignition. There followed the wildest ride of his life. The Toyota swung left as far as it could go, then swung back to the right, threatening to tunnel itself under the semi. It stopped short and swung left again. Bob was sliding back and forth in ever increasing arcs and there was nothing he could do about it. John continued the pass and a final hard swing took both of them to the ditch, fortunately upright. Bob was speechless. It took awhile before he could pry his white fingers off the steering wheel.

Price matters

We continued to build Blackstone by saving engines in cars, trucks, airplanes, and factory machines. Our clients stuck with us because our program really worked. We saved them money, it was as simple as that.

Selling it was another matter. You can be the best and know you are the best but still have trouble convincing new client prospects. Our defensive position was to maintain our current client list by saving them money. Our offensive position was pounding the bricks with all the energy I could muster up and still get into work that afternoon to get the reports out in a timely manner. There was intense competition out there for the limited numbers of businesses that used oil analysis. We were the best but not the cheapest, and cheap seemed, at least at the time, to turn more heads than did quality. The benefits of using our quality program were so great that I thought the cost of the oil samples was incidental. The problem was convincing new clients of that.

At first I tried selling oil analysis at the same price as my competitors. Most of them had subsidized programs, meaning they had another source of income, like oil or equipment sales, and could provide oil analysis at an unrealistically low price, often half of the cost of actually processing the oil sample. As an independent laboratory we had no such advantage. Competing price-wise was the shortest possible path to bankruptcy. I had to raise prices or cease to exist. We did that in short steps until we finally got to the point that the volumes we were running could support the company and the three of us, if we didn’t expect much income.

Enter Craig

Sales grew quickly in the first three years, but fortune really smiled on us when Craig joined us as a commission-only salesman. Craig was between jobs and marriages and was an acquaintance of John’s. Always open to a new product or idea, Craig stopped by one day to see what we were up to. It was our third year of operation. He found our approach to oil analysis exciting and decided he could bury us in oil samples in a short period of time. I’d heard it all before, but having been out there pounding the bricks myself, I was willing to try anything. Craig was different in a charming way. A moderately tall, bright-eyed, lanky young man with prematurely graying hair, he was a guy women wanted to hug. There were times I wanted to hug him myself.

If the Greek derivation of the word enthusiasm is “god within,” Craig was blessed with an entire committee of gods. He liked to laugh and it was fun laughing with him. We talked about where we might find new business and he decided it was factories, which were the biggest users of oil of all the companies that used oil analysis. I’d had good luck with factories and had several as clients.

We had a Ford factory in the Toledo area that sampled stamping machines regularly. We found a mechanical problem on one of their presses right before the 4th of July holiday. When they checked the oil reservoir they found parts of a gear. They managed to fix the machine over the holiday and lost no production. Had the machine failed during a production run, they estimated their losses would have been about $5 million. They paid us $15.00 for the analysis report. That’s a nice payback, no matter how you look at it.

Craig looked around and decided to target the automakers’ factories and those of their suppliers. The Motor City was within driving distance. After working the phones for a few days, something Craig had a wonderful knack for, he set out at his own expense to sell them.

Oil analysis was not widely used in factories at the time so he didn’t run into the competition that I had been butting heads with in other market areas. While I placed articles in trade journals, Craig knocked on doors, piquing interest in how much money the industrial guys could save with oil analysis

We had three months with Craig working full time, and during that time he brought remarkable progress to our program. His income on the commission-only basis was not growing fast enough to support both him and his ex-wife, so he eventually went to work selling roofs for a company that could pay him more. He stayed on with us, however, part time. He and I did a lot of traveling together in the next couple of years, doing presentations along with direct sales. Craig was, and still is, a remarkable individual. He will never be accused of being a small thinker. At one time he tried to sell the U.S. Air Force. I know. I was with him. They actually talked with us. We didn’t get the sale. (Just for the record, the U.S. Military does its own analysis. As we understand it, every military aircraft has an oil sample done before each flight.)

If Craig was the maestro, I was at least the saloon piano player. I saw firsthand what a professional sales person could do for a fledging company. We grew like wildfire until the recession of 1989. Those were heady years. We established decent incomes, upgraded the facility and eventually bought the building we were in. All three of us were driving company cars, though none of them were new or particularly reliable. From 1985 until 1989, I felt like we were achieving success.

The tide goes out

As surely as the tide rushes in, it reverses and ebbs back out again. Auto sales plunged in 1989, and the automakers and their suppliers contracted to bleak austerity. They work in a cyclical business, and roughly every three years (at least back then) they worked a boom and bust market. It was like a well-choreographed dance. When hard times came to call, they would cut all non-essential spending, including oil analysis. In the short span of three months, we lost nearly 50% of our business.

Craig drifted away and eventually moved to Colorado and remarried. I thought we would recoup the factory business when the recession ended, but it wasn’t to be. The oil companies, which provided cheap (read: subsidized) oil analysis programs, moved into the gardens we had cultivated. The automakers and their larger suppliers instituted new purchasing schemes that precluded working with a company as small as Blackstone.

Once the dust settled and I could clearly see where we were, we began trying to rebuild the dream. We had successes and failures, like any business. Competition had intensified during the long drought of ’89–’92. Many of the traditional markets we had been working in were occupied with new squatters. I found new ways to sell, but there were long periods of time where I couldn’t make much progress. For the ensuing half-decade we always had a main customer or two that sustained us, but it became increasingly difficult to maintain payroll and keep our aging equipment running. For the longest time, the magic was gone. We existed but we couldn’t seem to grow. Sales peaked in ’91, then flattened out and didn’t make any real progress until ’97.

Personally, things got equally as tough. Both my kids were headed off to college, my daughter to Indiana University, my son, two years later, to Purdue. If you haven’t had the experience of getting bursar bills unexpectedly, along with other miscellaneous charges from the university, you haven’t seen hard times. We had no plans or savings to cover the expenses, so we just muddled along, paying costs out of cash flow, which, while adequate for the four of us living together minimally, was hardly adequate under the new circumstances. We got by but I don’t know how. Much of it was my kids’ willingness to work and do whatever was possible with limited funds.

My wife and I eventually divorced. Then my brothers and I had a falling out. We had worked together a decade and though we had a lot of good times together, and we could not have gotten that far without all three of us, it became clear that unless something changed, we would eventually fail. Bob left first and eventually bought a small town newspaper, which he has turned into a successful operation. John retired to his workshop.

Turning point

In August 1996 I was just getting started rebuilding a two-acre farm property that my fiancé Sue and I had pooled our money to buy. Two weeks after moving in, Sue and I were married in the front yard. That was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal stretch of time that had begun in 1991. I didn’t know it at the time but it was also a pivotal point in my life and the life of Blackstone Laboratories.

My daughter Kristin had graduated from Indiana University with an English degree and moved to Colorado. She had found happiness and success in magazine editing. My son Ryan had graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from Purdue University. He had interviewed for engineering work but hadn’t decided on anything definite.

While Blackstone hadn’t fallen into complete disarray, we had, for a very long period of time, established a pattern of no progress. We would win some and lose some, but there was no significant growth for six years. The dream wasn’t dead but it was seriously tarnished for most everyone with whom I was associated, business or personal. Except for one person.

Unbeknownst to me, Ryan, who had been on the outskirts of the business since the company started when he was 12, knew as much about Blackstone as anyone alive. I thought he would probably take an engineering job, maybe far away from home, and pursue his own life. He could have done that with my blessing.

One evening in August 1996, Ryan and his fiancée, Sheri, were over for a cookout. After dinner we were relaxing in my back yard when I asked Ryan what his plans were for the future. He said, “Well Dad, I thought maybe I’d join you to help build Blackstone.”

I was stunned. Here was a bright young man with great earning potential, saying he was willing to come work with me knowing I could hardly pay him a livable wage. I told him I would see what I could do. It took awhile, but on April 15, 1997, he went on the payroll at about a third of what he could have made elsewhere.

John was still running the lab at the time, and I’d brought Sue in to run the front office and accounting. With Ryan on the property there were four of us. We didn’t have much to show for twelve years of operations. Our equipment was aging and there was little money with which to replace it.

We had only one computer to write reports on, and it was tied to an old printer that we couldn’t get parts for. The original programmer was still around to help when an emergency came up, but he was never more than a moonlighter and had less and less interest in helping out.

From the moment Ryan first set foot on the property, the old start-up magic began creeping back into the company. His approach can be summed up with a statement he often made at the time, “Whatever it takes, Dad, whatever it takes.” I had company in my desperate situation and Ryan didn’t see it nearly as desperate as I. We had a business. We had cash flow. Working with him was refreshing. I had an inkling that we just might get the company back on track.

The old magic returns

I found a spectrometer in Detroit and the financing to buy it. That solved the problem of aging equipment. Ryan drove up to New Hampshire to spend a week at spectrometry school. He camped out in a tent in late October to save us hotel expense. When he got back he put the new machine in gear and, for the first time in history, Blackstone had an expert in spectrometry on the payroll.

It was wonderful to have a bright-eyed, enthusiastic young man to work with. He was interested in all phases of the business and took many chores of the operation into his office. We started making progress. Ryan set up new processes and systems that improved our efficiency. He solved many of the problems that had made us fragile. I had less to worry about and work became fun again. The mood of the company improved. There seemed to be nothing Ryan wasn’t interested in and nothing he couldn’t do. He was the first person I was ever able to teach the report-writing process to.

We had been on the Internet for some time. Selling oil analysis via the Internet was John’s idea. He’d heard about a guy who sold buckets using this new medium. There was nothing special about his buckets and they weren’t even cheap. But he became a huge bucket salesman with his Internet sales.

I agreed we should give the Internet a try. With the help of a computer-savvy nephew, Bob and John had started and administered a website. It wasn’t very good but it did generate interest, some of it international. Though it wasn’t expensive as a sales tool, it didn’t make us any money in those first few years either. Being in the throes of a perpetual cash shortage, I thought many times about discontinuing the website. When I mentioned this to Ryan, he thought otherwise.

By making it more informative and user-friendly Ryan thought we could make the website productive. We reorganized and rewrote it and had a professional reestablish our presence on the web. The result was amazing. The growth of the Internet during that period was incredible. More people had home computers, and our presence on the Internet meant oil analysis was available to the general public for the first time. More people became aware of what oil analysis could do for their personal cars and trucks. To use an analogy, for the first twelve years of our existence, we were trying to throw a basketball into the hoop from the far end of the floor. Using the Internet, we began throwing basketballs into a canyon standing on the rim. We can’t throw them in fast enough, nor is there any chance, in my lifetime, that we will fill the canyon up.

Upgrades & hiring

The software that originally got me past hand-typing reports and invoices was still in use when Ryan started. During his four years at Purdue’s engineering school he had become familiar with computers and networking. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to suggest he was appalled by the antiquated system I had been limping along with.

Sales were improving, so he hired an outside contractor to build the foundation of a new database system. After a few months that company became too aggressive with their billing practices so we had to undertake the project in-house. Ryan tackled this project too, taking some courses to learn how to program and hiring a full-time programmer to help complete the project.

Early in 2002, sales were booming. I had my back against the wall — even with Ryan’s help I was writing so many reports every day that it was physically getting me down. If you’ve used our oil analysis program, you know we write individual comments for every report. If I had to keep typing reports at the rate I was, I was going to be worn out completely. We needed another analyst who could pick up report writing and some of the other aspects of the business.

“What about Kristin?” I asked, one rainy night as Ryan and I were making our way our to our cars after another long, hard day. It stopped Ryan in his wet tracks. “I’ll think about that,” he replied. By the next morning we were working on the idea of possibly bringing Kristin into the business.

Kristin and her husband were living in Michigan. She was managing editor of yet another magazine. They had recently relocated from Colorado and were settling into a new life and home. At first I didn’t think there was much of a chance of getting Kristin into the company. But after some discussions, she joined us in April 2002. As it turned out, Kristin not only proved to be an expert report writer, but she picked up many of the other business functions that were overloading the rest of us. Today, Kristin is a vital part of the business. She is not only the report writing champ, but manages virtually all of the non-direct operating functions of the company including the website and newsletter.

Saving engines

We have always had the technical ability to save engines and other mechanical systems from failure. As sales grew we saved more engines. As our saves increased, so did our reputation. When we save an aircraft engine it is often a life-and-death matter. When the save is an industrial machine, it can save millions of dollars in downtime. When it is a car or truck engine, it adds many years of useful life to the vehicle and is equivalent to putting thousands of dollars in a client’s pocket. When you compare the cost of an oil analysis to the potential savings, the payback is tremendous.

Looking back on two decades I can see turning points that brought us through perilous junctions in a long journey. Some of it was planned but much of it was sheer luck (or fate, if you will). There are nearly 300 million people in the U.S. alone, who own twice that many cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes. To keep those transportation systems alive and well, they need oil analysis as much as people need doctors. It is our job at Blackstone to make our technology as commonly known and accepted as X -rays and MRIs. We are doing that and the result is a phenomenal, modern-day success story. Is this a great country or what?

Pardon me for the long story. My business card says “Founder.” I’m proud of my kids and all they’ve done to make Blackstone the great and growing company it is. I’m proud of our technology and that we can make it easily understood. We don’t have a doctor to interpret laboratory results. We are the doctors.

Looking ahead

Jim is no longer with us; he passed away peacefully at his home in November 20, 2015.

But his dream lives on.

Blackstone has customers from all 50 states and over 75 different countries on six different continents, and we’re still growing. It’s been a great ride so far, and it ain’t over yet.

By Jim Stark|2024-09-18T14:23:22-04:00July 13, 2023|Aircraft, Articles, Gas/Diesel Engine, Industrial, Lab Tests, Marine|Comments Off

Oil Viscosity

Most of us have only a vague understanding of viscosity. We tend to choose an oil with a viscosity that we believe is correct for our particular engine, but would another viscosity improve or reduce the life of the engine? Can we pick and choose a viscosity outside the manufacturer’s recommendations?

Technically, viscosity is defined as resistance to flow. Commonly, though, we think of it as an oil’s thickness. To be more specific, it is the thickness of oil at a given temperature. The plot thickens (ha!).

The viscosity of an oil could be reported at any temperature, but to standardize things, most laboratories report either a low temp (100F or 40C) or a high temp viscosity (212F or 100C) and stick with either Fahrenheit or Celsius. At Blackstone we report the high-temp viscosity, which is generally the temperature the engine is at while it’s running and the temperature at which the oil spends most of its time. We can do the low-temp viscosity too, if you’re interested, but the engine spends so little time running at the low-temp viscosity that it’s not a useful test for most people.

An apple is an apple, no matter what language you use to describe it. In the same respect, there are many ways to describe viscosity: engines use the SAE engine chart, industrial equipment mostly uses the ISO chart, gear oils use the SAE gear chart, etc. (Download your own viscosity chart here.) No matter what you call it, the number given defines the thickness of the oil at the standard high temperature.

Multi-grades explained

Engine oil can be either straight weight or a multi-grade viscosity. A major difference between the two is simply the addition of a VI additive, which allows the oil to maintain more or less the same flow rate regardless of its operating environment. Think of the difference between honey and water. Cold honey flows very slowly, but if you put it in the microwave and heat it up, it will flow much more easily. Water, on the other hand, flows at pretty much the same rate whether it’s hot or cold. That’s because water has a very narrow viscosity range, whereas honey’s is much wider. When it comes to engine oil, it naturally has a wide viscosity range, like honey, flowing slowly when it’s cold and faster when it’s hot. But we want it to act like it has a narrow viscosity range, like water, maintaining a fairly consistent flow rate regardless of whether the oil is cold or warm. That’s where viscosity improvers enter the picture. The VI additives in multi-grade oil help it move more easily through a cold engine upon start-up, but still provide cushion and lubrication when it’s hot.

Which viscosity to use?

People often ask us if it’s okay to use a different viscosity oil than what the manufacturer recommends. And typically, the answer is yes. Engine manufacturers dyno-test their engines using a specific viscosity oil, so when you use the viscosity they recommend, you are working with a known result. Going to another viscosity is an experiment, but it’s usually a harmless one. For the sake of efficiency, you want to run the lightest grade oil in your engine possible, within limits. If you’re racing, for example, that may require a thicker oil to stand up to the heat demands of more extreme use.

Over the last few years we have seen a trend of lighter oil for new engines. The common 10W/30 of a decade or two ago has become a 5W/30, 5W/20, or 0W/20. Many manufacturers use 5W/20 or 0W/20 oil at the factory (even in trucks) and recommend it for everyday use for many light vehicles. Feel free to try different grades until you find one that suits your particular situation.

Changes in viscosity

Lots of things can affect the viscosity. Adding anything foreign to your oil can change its viscosity — some types of aftermarket additives cause a high viscosity, and some solvent-type additives can cause the viscosity to thin out. Another thing that can change a viscosity is contamination. Moisture and fuel can change the viscosity, depending on the contaminant and how long it has been present in the oil. Excessive soot and antifreeze often increase an oil’s viscosity. Exposure to excessive heat (leaving the oil in place too long, engine overheating) can increase the viscosity of engine oil, though leaving ATF in place too long can cause it to get thinner, not thicker. Some engines will shear the viscosity down no matter what oil you use.

When your oil’s viscosity comes back as either lower or higher than the “Should Be” range, something is causing it. The key is to find out why and repair your engine or adjust your driving habits accordingly, and to correct the viscosity and optimize your engine’s efficiency. Test your oil while figuring out what to use. Your wear metals don’t lie!

By Jim Stark|2024-09-19T10:39:52-04:00July 13, 2023|Articles, Lab Tests|Comments Off

Pre-Buy Samples: The Art of the (Craigslist) Deal

Taking a sample before buying a new plane or boat is common practice in the aviation and marine industries, and it’s just as useful for anyone looking for their next car, truck, or motorcycle. If you’re anything like us, you probably spend an unhealthy amount of time browsing the local classifieds and Craigslist hunting for the elusive bargain. And although oil analysis can’t stop you from making a wire transfer to your new foreign royalty business associate, it can help you avoid buying a total lemon, and maybe even calm your nerves on the initial drive home.

Pulling a sample before plunking down the dough is a good move. We’ll test the oil for excessive amounts of metal, contamination, and solids. We compare your results to our database of samples from similar makes/models, giving you a good look at how internal parts are getting along, and if there are any looming problems driving the current owner to sell you their beloved ride. We’re familiar with common problems for certain engine models and years, and we know how different issues look in analysis.

It can be tricky to gauge whether excess metals are from poor wear or from how the engine has been used, especially if you don’t know how long the oil has been run. But even if the oil was recently changed, we can still often see evidence of serious problems. Maybe coolant has just started getting into the oil, but there’s not yet enough to give the oil that telltale milkshake appearance. It takes a pretty bad internal coolant leak to cause a visual change to the oil, but it doesn’t take much coolant to show up in analysis.

You’ll also learn the oil’s viscosity range, which can show if the current owner was using the correct grade. Analysis will also pick up on things like dirt from an intake leak or excess fuel from an injector issue. We always point out any potential problems in the report comments, and try to provide possible reasons for abnormal findings in the comments to help you make sense of the results.

Sampling

Most private owners and dealerships will allow you to collect a sample, at least with a bit of persuasion. The current owner has a vested interest in the health of their vehicle, and offering a copy of a report might help even if you don’t go through with the purchase.

We sell a vacuum https://www.blackstone-labs.com/products/vacuum-pump/pump so you can take a sample through the dipstick right then and there, while you’re looking at the vehicle. Samples can also be taken by loosening the oil filter or drain plug enough for some oil to drain out — just be sure to clean the area around the sample collection point if you go this route. If a seller refuses to let you collect a sample without good reason, that alone might be the red flag that sends you running.

Getting results in a hurry

We know you’re working on a tight schedule to make the deal happen, so if you don’t have a kit on hand when you go to look at your new ride, don’t fret. You can send the oil in any clean, plastic container with a screw-on lid. Just be sure to collect enough oil for testing (about 100 mL or 3 ounces, which is a little less than half a cup), and package the sample appropriately so it doesn’t leak in transit. The same information slips included in the kits can be found on our website. We appreciate all the info we can get about a sample, as it helps make sense of the results so we can provide the best possible report in return.

Buying a used vehicle can be an adventure, and we’re here to help you make the most informed decision possible!

By Ryan Stark|2024-09-19T10:17:51-04:00July 13, 2023|Articles, Gas/Diesel Engine, Marine|Comments Off