Two-stroke oil

I will volunteer to test the oil in your glider for you. =-O

Excellent description, by the way.

On 10/15/2015 10:27 PM, bumper wrote:
On Thursday, October 15, 2015 at 2:32:57 PM UTC-7, Jonathan St. Cloud wrote:
Over on the ASH-26E newsgroup there is a thread that the recommended oil for the ASH-26E, ASH-31, and the solo 2350 is no longer available in the U.S.

Anyone have suggestions, comments. What are the two stroke owners doing for oil?
There's a broad selection of acceptable pre-mix and injector options for 2-stroke piston engines. Unfortunately, what the two strokes are doing for oil won't be of much help when choosing oil for the Wankel engine used in Schleicher self-launch gliders.

There's a Norton rotary powered motorcycle owners forum, mostly in Europe, that have also seen a decreasing supply of acceptable oil - but they still have a supply. In the USA we don't, as of now.

This is not to say that out of the huge selection of 2-stroke oils that are available here, there isn't one of more that would work just fine, it's just that the factory makes recommendations of acceptable oils (none of which now are now sold here, probably due to the low demand), so if an owner tries an untested oil and "Fries His Wankel" (sounds painful), it's a very expensive lesson and probably every bit as painful as it sounds.

Wankel oil has to have a high temperature range, ashless, and provide good corrosion protection after shut down. A pre-mix is called for on the AE50 engine even though that oil is not pre-mixed in the common sense, but directly injected into the rotor cooling air to lubricate the E-shaft and bearings. The spent cooling air and oil then goes into an air/oil separator and the recovered oil gets sucked into the intake manifold and joins the air/fuel charge to lubricate the rotor seals etc. The remainder of the spent cooling air/oil mist goes coaxially around the exhaust pipe and is burned there and against the muffler.

So the oil for our Wankel has to function as both an injector and pre-mix oil. Note that most 2-stroke oils are sold for one function or the other, so you can see that this "dual spec" requirement may eliminate most oils.

Royal Purple Co. suggests that there HP 2-C oil works well (in Mazda Wankel engines as used in racing, and for injector and pre-mix). This oil may well work for our application - but I haven't tested it and am not brave enough to try it. Do we have any volunteers?






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Dan, 5J