Fairly well controlled test they ran by using twins on the same boat, and very thorough evaluation they conducted! It's good to see it was based on ASTM standards! I used to do similar distress trending work on jet engine hot sections after endurance tests, but nobody had done that before, so there were no standards . . . we had to just make up our own as we went along! We got good results but it was harder to convince our USN and USAF customers that the tests were valid since both the tests and evaluation procedures were all new! They finally agreed with us, but it took awhile!
The reported distress differences are so small that they're probably due to minor within-tolerance differences between engines. Interesting that it did confirm that XD-100 burns so clean that a decarb process is not needed to prevent ring sticking! I tend to agree that it's probably the same oil, although E-TECs have been run for thousands of hours in commercial applications like Sea-TOW, so a longer test might have been more definitive. Don, do you know if Amsoil has their own refinery?
Building and operating a refinery is an enormous capital-intensive operation that's way beyond what the engine builders could afford, so their oils are simply made to their specifications by one of the major oil companies. Don't know if that logic also applies to Amsoil or not. Although the Amsoil stuff is probably close enough to safely use in an E-TEC that's off warranty, BRP has a good record of often covering parts costs of some failures well beyond the warranty period, so I think I'll keep using XD-100 since I really don't use that much anyway and it's cheap insurance as Don says. However the Amsoil stuff appears to work great, so using it in any oil-injected motor seems to be a good idea!
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