![]() “To quote a famous aircraft engine man,(me) ‘There Ain't No Mechanic In A Can.’ I am also very skeptical of any snake oil that advertises using the phrase: ‘Try our unique “Engine Overhaul In A Can” 100% risk free!’ “Now a personal opinion, if you want to spend $25.00 just do a short interval oil change and I believe you will get as much if not more for your dollars. But, I no longer use the product and the condition has not returned. Our Tiger seemed to have a lazy valve on cold start which seemed to go away when I added the product. “The net result was that the product does not hurt the engine and in a few cases (from testimonials) it seemed to help with valve sticking problems in some small Continentals and a few Lycomings. I had no bone to pick with anybody one way or the other and the people who owned the product at that time were helpful but made no demands. Not 100% scientific but this was an independent study that I personally funded. We measured the wear metal results over the study period and summarized them by specific engine group. “Using all kinds of aircraft engines from radials to flats where I had an oil analysis history prior to the owner starting to use the product and continuing on for two years as the owner continued to use the product. “Several years ago I finished a two-year blind study on. ![]() ![]() So before you go dumping anything other than aviation oil per the engine manufacturer’s recommendations into your oil system, consider all three points and some additional words noted below.Īlso, if you read Savvy Aviator Mike Busch’s column “Slippery Stuff” in the February 2011 EAA Sport Aviation ( ), you’ll see he says much the same as I’ve said above – don’t bother with anything but CamGuard, but CamGuard does appear to help. My suggestion is that if your engine goes more than a week between flights, you either use Exxon Elite or add CamGuard to whatever else you’re using. Adding CamGuard to Elite showed little improvement over Elite alone. Tests by Aviation Consumer showed that Exxon Elite was measurably superior to the other oils in corrosion protection, but adding CamGuard to those other oils produced similar results to Elite. One of the folks who developed that package later left Exxon and continued work on an aftermarket additive product which would give other oils similar capability. They wanted superior corrosion protection during periods of disuse, and put in a package of additives not included in previous oils like Phillips X/C 20W50 and Aeroshell 15W50. CamGuard’s history lies in the development of Exxon Elite back in the 90’s. There is one exception to this general advice, and that’s CamGuard. Point 3: If your engine is still in warranty, you should be aware that Lycoming says that the use of any oil additive (other than LW-16702, an anti-scuffing, anti-wear additive - see Lycoming SB's 446 and 471, and SI 1409, which you can them faxed to you free by calling Lycoming at 1-80 or 57, for details on which engines this is allowed/not allowed/required in) is unnecessary and against their recommendations – which could void your warranty. Guess what - the control engine also ran for 20 minutes and failed the same way. "See," they said, "after using our stuff your engine can run for 20 minutes after the oil is lost!" Some consumer advocate outfit duplicated the test, but this time with a control - an identical engine with the same oil but without the additive. An oil additive outfit was running ads showing how they added their magic stuff to engine oil, ran the engine a while, and then drained the oil and ran the engine for like 20 minutes before it seized. Point 2: I heard about a test run a while back on some car engines. And I doubt that any of the additive inventors would find the serious offer of a major oil company for such a product too small to accept. Therefore, I figure that if any of these additives were really useful, the big refiners would buy up the rights, put it in their own oil, and either charge more for the better oil or grab more market share at the same price once we aviators found out how much better it is. Further, they do not have any vested financial interest (to my knowledge) in any engine overhaul shops or engine parts manufacturers. Just ask Mobil what happens when you screw that up (Google Mobil AV-1 if you don't remember that far back). Point 1: I've always believed that Shell, Phillips, and the rest have a vested financial interest in producing and selling the best possible oil for your aircraft engine.
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