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MOTUL 300V for Lycoming?

glider_rider

Active Member
ULPower recommends MOTUL 300V COMPETITION 15W-50 for their air cooled engines running on unleaded gas. Is anyone in using it for a Lycoming?
I would appreciate any feedback on this oil
 
Technically, my current engine is a Whammadyne 540....so I can neither confirm nor deny that I've used Motul 300V in my Lycoming. :cool:

The short answer is that it works well if you're running UNLEADED fuel. HOWEVER, and this is a big one, the oil will darken from it's green color to a darker green, fairly quickly when running 100LL and fully brown ~40 hours. And you need to be religious about changing at no more than 50 hours, with the detergent reserve being essentially depleted by that point.

I put a UL350iS engine in my RV12, and as you've said, the 300V is the recommended oil by ULP and I had great success for the 500+ hours I put on that engine. Out of curiosity, having an extra case of the stuff on hand after the RV12 was gone, I ran it for 5 hours in my 540-X as an experiment on the test stand with UL91; oil analysis was essentially "new oil".

Synthetic oil does not suspend lead combustion byproducts well, and is the reason Mobil quit making their synthetic aviation oil many years back. However, Motul 300V, being Ester based, does a better job than the common synthetics and going 50 hours is fine.

For unleaded fuel - it ran well for 100 hours on the UL350 with great Blackstone Analysis results, and I have no doubt it will perform equally as well in a 540. While it states it is suitable for all engines, it was designed for air cooled engines.

All of that aside, unless you have a screaming deal on the stuff, it's more expensive than Phillips Victory (about twice when comparing retail prices), so I went back to that.
 
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thanks a lot!
As the price is concerned, Motul 300V is slightly more expensive than Aeroshell 15W50, but it's fully synthetic. For that reason I would expect it to be better oil
 
As long as you can avoid leaded fuel, running a synthetic would be best for our engines, according to the engine experts I've read/listened to. I mostly run unleaded fuel, but occasionally need to run 100LL when traveling, so I am sticking with aviation oil (Total Aero DM 15W50) with Camguard.

When we finally get unleaded avgas everywhere, we can use fully synthetic oil without the risks that lead causes.
 
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