Oil leak tracking dye , market?

Flyinglizard

Flyinglizard

New member
I use oil dye for the TA cars that have lots of oil in small spaces. The colors allows easy fast leak detection.

Is there a market for the SCCA racers? The cost is about 5$ per 2 gr, enough to do 2 gal of oil.
\ Most of the IT guys could use only one color IMHo as the engine and trans are the only close oils.
Thanks, MM
 
I could see the Nissan guys going through gallons of that stuff. The power steering systems often weep/leak from multiple places that get covered in goo quick enough that you can't tell where it comes from.

My car leaks just enough oil to make the front of the block dirty, but my main issue a cheap crank pulley that doesn't play well with the crank seal.
 
We used it on an Audi to identify if a rear main seal was leaking on the clutch or if it was the tranny leaking.... It was the tranny :). Very helpful!

Stephen
 
I am going to try to have a 10$ dye pack for sale soon.
Not sure how much oil it will treat @ that price yet. The amount needed is 1 Gram per gallon.
Still doing the math and getting a feel for market. It is very expensive for the stuff I want to run.
 
An easy compound to use in oil/water marketing is fluorescein, a fluorescent dye. Fluorescein is cheap, easy to detect, and ideal for this sort of work. Micromolar and nanomolar quantities of fluorescein are detectable with a black light, millimolar very easy to detect with the eye in most cases, and easy with the black light as well. Really easy if any of you have one of these 405nm laser pen pointers that are out now for like $10. Not only do these lasers make great cat toys with some attenuation using a tape or film (watch direct illumination of kitties and reflections into eyes), their wavelength is good for exciting fluorescein.

If we're shooting for detection with a handheld black light (about $5) and some visual, and assuming a cooling system holds 2.5 gallons of water (10L), and fluorescein has a molecular weight of 388 g/mol, give or take, and we want a 1mM concentration....

Molarity = mols / volume

1 x 10-3 = n / 10 L

n = 1 x 10-2 mols

1 x 10-2 mols * 388 g/mol = 3.88g needed, so toss in 3-4 grams for the average car cooling system, or half that for an oil system and you should be good to go. You can get 500g of say 90% fluorescein for about $100 or so, about $0.25 a gram, from Fisher, VWR and others. We use fluorescein in my line of work and I generally have some in my trailer if anyone needs a dose for their car.
 
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