Maintenance

[BigBear]

I have some high copper in my engine oil sample on a D8N. The soduim is up a little to. The dealer is telling me that I might have antifreeze leaking by the engine oil cooler but there is no antifreeze showing up in the sample. I think they are trying to sell me a repair because they are slow. Any opinions?

[HaulinHaas]

Sounds like you need to put that thing on a low salt diet for a week! No seriously you probably should look into that a little farther. If there is antifreeze in there it will wreck that engine in no time.

[BigScott]

To me, that is NOT a good th ing. I believe if you have a cracked block or head, you can get anti freeze in your oil that way. If I'm right that is not good. Not claiming to be the expert.

[BigBear]

I took your advice and called the cat dealer. They sent me to the oil lab guy and he said that it might be the engine oil cooler starting to fail. Eventually the cooper from the core leaches into the coolant and when the core just starts leaking into the oil it kicks the sodium up and shows high copper! He said the cooler is pretty expensive to replace and suggested that I resample in a short interval. He also said that I could take the radiator cap off, only when it was a cold engine, and see if there is oil floating on top of the coolant. He said that the oil is higher pressure then the water so if a leak is starting it will most likely be transferring oil into the coolant as well.

Sounds like good advice so I am having my guy pull a sample now.

[BigBear]

Hey, by the way I asked them if the could do oil sampling on my Harley and they said yes!

[drkosamia]

Copper in oil can be also from main bearings but it should be supported with lead and iron in oil at same time. Turbocharger bearings are of allow metal (phosphors bronze) and copper being principle mettle of Phosphors. - bronze, wear of these bearings should also give trace of copper in oil but in your case as you have are tracing increase in sodium means water is also leaking and you must inspect oil cooler immediately for leaking of any of the core. If it is at early stage than you may block that single core and use rest of cooler before it fails completely.

[oldtimer]

Not sure if you have resolved this. The high copper along with high sodium with no antifreeze or water that you indicated could be an indication of coolant leakage in the intake air system and possibly from the aftercooler core.  The copper and sodium only are usually an indication of this.

[sskalet]

We have four CAT 3520C.  One of them had a recurring problem with copper in the engine oil.  Right after the copper content increased, the engine cooler would fail.  A second engine also had the problem occur.  The local CAT dealer was out to investigate for greater than 6 months.  Several oil coolers were sent to the root cause failure team for CAT.  Each time we had another failure, the coolers were sent in and no word.  Just the usual, we are in the que....

CAT kept paying for the new coolers, but it made a mess every time they failed.  Oil got into the antifreeze stream, drain the systems.....

The fix was implemented a while back and we have not had a failure since.  The fix was to install a marine grade oil cooler.  We have since put them on all four engines.