Tuesday 29 May 2012

Which is the right marine 2 stroke oil?


My start with two stroke engines as many years ago, it was a 2hp Seagull and that ended up as a swop for a rubber duck dinghy in Rio do Janerio, we needed to get ashore, having an outboard and no dinghy was not going to work?


The picture shows two things, the mix in the plastic rectangular container is just one month old, it was in a brass tank of a 3.5hp British Seagull that one month. When it went into the tank it looked like the freshly mixed fuel in the plastic 5ltr container which was mixed the day before.

In years gone by and with the old style (real) petrol such degrade was not an issue, we could mix and store for ages, is this not the case now?



The mix shown in the open container has gone a dark brown, why? I used some old Mobil marine grade 2 stroke oil I had, its about twenty years old, does it go off?



A friend has recomended I use Shell Nautilus premium outboard  oil, as he has mixed that with unleaded petrol and stored it for many months with out any degrade.



Shell Nautilus is dyed green, so matches the unleaded fuel a little, this helps with later identification of the mixture, the reverse side of the five litre container has the 10:1 British Seagull ratio and also the date I mixed it writen in a black koki pen.
I will let you know how I get on with this Shell oil.

Roy