Brought to you by SwedishDiesel Group’s Fueling Division.

In the no-man’s-land of Indiana sits a company by the name of Blackstone Laboratories, which provides testing services for used oils as a means of finding out if your engine is on the verge of grenading itself. They test for viscosity, flash point, suspended solids, presence of water or coolant, as well as the levels of various additives present to determine if you can push that 20k mile old oil another 5k.

I highly recommend you read their FAQ page. To quote one of our MisShift assholes, “Thanks to this faq I want to do business with this company even though I won’t ever need it” 

Refer back to the Donkey Van review, where one of the materials aboard the ship was a horrible butt-water colored sludge in an Ocean Spray juice bottle. This liquid(?) horror of dubious origin came from one of Dan Verona’s machines; an old Briggs Intek 206 engine originally from a wood chipper now mated to a Murray minibike frame.

Dan said it absolutely reeked of fuel, and one whiff was enough to confirm this. The look and smell led me to believe it contained every carcinogen known to man. There was some weird emulsion accumulated at the bottom of the bottle resembling a cookies n’ cream Hershey bar. Looked delicious. We theorized that it might’ve been some weird reaction with ethanol from the fuel clearly present in the mixture. Curiosity prevailed, and we decided it must be evaluated.

We titled our sample “mystery sludge”, filled out the card, and off it went into the void of USPS via a coughing Grumman LLV. The sample arrived within the week, and after about a month of waiting I got a PDF in my inbox.

Most notably was the incredibly high water content – it’s supposed to be 0% by volume and was tested at 6%, BY VOLUME. 6% of the oil was WATER. How is that engine still alive.

Is it even still alive?

What constitutes as “alive?”

Engines aren’t sentient, right?

Am I even real?

Regardless, as we’ve learned from the YARD MAN™, homemade machining coolant does NOT sufficiently lubricate engine internals. The amusing part is there was so much water mixed in that they couldn’t measure flash point, the sample just boiled. So we may never know the exact fuel content. I’m sure a 7.3L IDI would still burn it though. 

We did send them a MSIMA sticker for their troubles, and if anyone from Blackstone Labs is reading, hello and thank you again!