The first Blackstone report told me the engine looked like a healthy new engine. The second and third reports were more satisfying because they turned that first impression into a trend.
Those later reports are where the story gets cleaner. N22UP was not just producing acceptable numbers. It was maturing in the direction I hoped it would.
The three-sample arc
Looking at the three reports together is much more useful than reading any one of them in isolation:
| Sample | Date | Hours on engine | Iron | Silicon | Copper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| R34374 | 2023-06-23 | 7 | 19 | 30 | 10 |
| R41396 | 2023-07-17 | 15 | 8 | 23 | 3 |
| R52792 | 2023-08-11 | 35 | 5 | 21 | 3 |
That is a very pleasant direction of travel:
- Iron falls from 19 to 8 to 5.
- Silicon falls from 30 to 23 to 21.
- Copper falls from 10 to 3 to 3.
That is exactly what I wanted from the first 35 hours of this engine’s life. The numbers did not merely stay out of trouble. They improved.
Why the second report mattered
The second sample, R41396, was drawn on July 17 after a shorter interval and came back with what was essentially an “engine maturing as it should” message.
That timing is important because it overlapped with the stretch when I was still actively working through the airplane’s early squawks. If you looked only at the maintenance log, you could easily imagine a more troubled engine story than the lab data actually supported.
Instead, the analysis suggested the opposite. The airplane still had details to sort out, but the core engine-wear picture was already calming down.
Why the third report mattered even more
The third sample, R52792, was the one that really made me smile. By August 11, the engine had 35 hours on it and the oil interval had stretched to twenty hours. That is a much more revealing sample than the very first short-interval pull.
By then, the structural-metal story was excellent. Iron and copper were both comfortably below the universal-average comparison numbers Blackstone provided, which is exactly where I wanted to be during break-in.
The lead number remained high across all three reports, but that was never the alarming part of the data set. With leaded avgas, a high lead count is ordinary. The more useful metals were the ones tied to actual wear, and those were all moving in the right direction.
The helpful detail about UV dye and leaks
One detail I appreciated from Blackstone’s commentary was the explicit note that the UV dye and leak-chasing work did not undermine the usefulness of the reports. That matters because there was a lot of other mechanical activity happening around this period, and it would have been easy to wonder whether the data had become noisy or misleading.
Instead, the lab results still produced a clean narrative:
- Early break-in debris looked normal.
- The trend improved with time.
- Nothing in the reports suggested a hidden structural problem.
What this gave me in Phase 1
By the back half of Phase 1, the oil-analysis sequence had become one of the quietest confidence builders in the whole program. It did not make the airplane leak-free. It did not answer every operational question. But it did tell me that the engine at the center of all of this work was maturing the way a good engine should.
That is why I think the three-report view is much more valuable than any one dramatic sample. It turns the engine from a source of early uncertainty into a trend you can actually trust.