RAM 2500 Oil.

evanvalk wrote:
Need Help or INF. I bought Used 2008 Ram 2500 turbo Diesel 6.7 Big Horn, Very low Mi. Runs And Looks great, But the first time I had to change the oil,12 Qts, w/new filter, On checking the level to make sure it was up, it was just as black as what I drained out, Is that normal or has anybody had the same thing happen,. Thanks for any thoughts, Ed

Ed, all diesels make soot during the combustion process. This soot gets past the rings and turn the oil black. Some diesels have EGR on them (yours does)and this puts even more soot into the oil.

Some people worry about the color of oil. This is unwarranted in a diesel because the soot that turns the oil black is sub 1 micron.

To give you an idea on how small that is, the period at the end of this sentence is around 600 microns. Cigarette smoke is right around 1 micron!

The clearance in the bearings of your engine is somewhere around 3 thousands of an inch. 25 microns will fit 1 one thousand of an inch.

HD engine oils for diesels are designed to absorb soot and they do a VERY good job at doing it.

My point in all of this is you can't tell how "dirty" an engine oil is just by it's color............or feel.............or looks or smell.

The ONLY way to tell how good of shape your oil is in "for sure" is send it to a lab like Blackstone or CAT and let them analyze it.

If you don't want to send a sample or two off for conformation; OLM's have proved time and time again that they are very close and even on the conservative side. The only people that don't believe in them are the uninformed or the people that have never set a sample in for ground truthing.