That is a good trick that we used for a long time on our Bio Rad (pre Digilab) then we found a source of TGA commercially available soot standards. It was very liner throughout all the ranges of the standards that we purchased.
When the stadards expired, we tried to buy more, but that source went out of business, or dropped off the map for some reason, (not enough of you folks out there bought their product and supported them!!)
Just joking, but we did see at the recent Lube Excellence 2007 that VHG is considering offering a commercially available soot standard. Maybe if enough folks support them in this regard, we can all keep it as a vaiable source of standard so we can all agree on soot by FTIR.