Oil samples ready to ship for analysis. Some labs use bottle-in-a-bottle shipping while others have boxes or envelopes.

by Kim Santere

Engine oil analysis for light aircraft is widely—and cheaply—available, but is it really worth the bother? By all means, in our view. Although oil analysis won’t work miracles, it’s so inexpensive and of such potential benefit that we think every owner should have an oil analysis program.

A number of labs offer this service so if the question isn’t whether to do analysis, it’s fair to ask which lab is best. To find out, we recently sent a dozen oil samples to six labs and compared the results, repeating an exercise we did six years ago. …