Lawn-Boy oil as lube in Cox engine fuel.

Oops I only meant to post that once

Lawn-Boy oil is used for mixing in gasoline for 2 stroke gas engines like lawn mowers, chainsaws, weed eaters, etc. Its a petroleum based oil with stabilizer. He mixes his fuel up in pint sized glass jars. The fuel ends up having a darker gold-brown color. He does mix Methanol, Klotz Castor oil, Ether, Klotz pure Nitromethane. Theres some other stuff he puts in it but this is all he would tell me. I asked him about the lawn-boy oil and he just goes "shhhh, you didn't see that". I would rather hope hes not adding something that would consider it cheating in his competition. Although the rules state you CAN mix your own fuel and do not have to use exactly 1/2 A as the competition is in the UM-RC which is in the range of .049-.20. Its not much of a race, its more a aerobatic competition but the speed of the trick done is sometimes a factor.

regards -Jeff

Hmm ether I only use that In my diesel. But the other things he would not tell you may be the secret as there is one additive called sical that a company in the uk uses for their glow fuel for cars it seems to give it more zip and then there are things like cetane boosters that are used in diesel fuel to aid ignition one That is common in diesel fuel is called iso propyl nitrate although some call it dii for diesel ignition improved.
If the lawn boy oil is derived from petroleum it may give off some power on ignition but there are so many things he could be using that he has not told you.
My advice to you is make some of your own fuel and add lawn boy and see if you notice a difference.
If you don't feel confident mixing fuels from scratch you may want to buy an rc car or boat fuel with high nitro and low oil and mix lawnboy in to get your desired oil and nitro content and see if you notice a difference.
And if you've never mixed fuels before remember to take the neccessary precautions.
Kind regards happy flying
-nitroairplane

I know what oil your talking about. http://www.lawnboy.com/ca_en/productinfo/parts/oil.html I mix that Lawn-Boy oil with 2 gallons of gas for a 32:1 ratio for use in my old 1979 lawn boy lawnmower. I have never heard of or even thought of mixing it with any glow engine fuel. I'm not sure if it is really doing anything to make the engine faster or lube it better. I guess it works fine for your friend, and he's confident that it will not harm his engine, it must be fine for him. I'm sure that hes not emptying a full 8 oz can into his pint jar mix, it would just kill the engine due to too much oil. I would have to see the entire formula of the fuel that he is mixing, but it sounds like he is keeping that a secret. I know that DA (desert aircraft) wants you to use Lawn-Boy oil in your mix for break-in of their engines but their engines are gas engines, not glow.

It would be a cold day in hell when he shows me his formula. He doesn't have a diesel head on his .051 nor do I. He let me run some through my engine and I do have to say it sure runs great on it. I checked the rpms and I was getting a good 19,500-21,000 rpms with a 5x3 stiff gray thimble drome prop. He has a throttle ring on his TD though, I believe it can lower it down to about 9,000 rpms and still have a max of about 19,500-21,000 rpms. I have not tried mixing my own fuel before but I have modified car fuel for better oil content and methanol content.

Best regards -Jeff

I guess some things will remain secrets for ever but if I hope you get the chance to find out as it very intriguing

That sounds like a neat experiment!

I'll mix some with the Sig 25% I usually test run engines with and see what happens

Matt.

Are you sure I would mix it with high nitro low oil car fuel so that you get the same percentage of nitro and oil as sig fuel than the test will be more valid as both will have the same nitro and oil content and that way you will know if the oil is making a difference an not just the nitro content.
Just my opinion.

I would agree with you nitro, but I'm curious if it will also work as a fuel additive to a 'standard' type of fuel.

I'll order some car fuel and try that out too at somepoint.

Matt.

I suppose if you want to test it as fuel additive you should add about 5% and you should see a small increase in rpm but it may not be noticeable in such small amounts.
I have another theory about where the added performance comes from it may be not that the oil is increasing performance may infant be the lack of castor oil because high performance fuels for high revving engines usually have synthetic oil not castor so may be the castor oil is too thick and slows the engine sown but i doubt it would make a noticeable difference but I think I will do an experiment of my own I would like to mix my 1/2a nitro with my d1000 diesel and testvit in both glow and diesel engines. It would probably work in most glow engines but probably will only work in larger diesels as it will have less ether so I suppose if I was going to run smaller diesels I would have to use a high ether prime like AndyW did when he tried running diesels on zero ether fuel.
If I lived in the USA I would send you some car fuel as now I only run 1/16th scale rc cars that only use engines the size of a cox .049 as I bought 10 litres (about 30 pints) of 35% nitro to laste the year but it has lasted me 3 an I still have 4 litres left
nitroairplane

Well, apparently one of the secret ingredients is acetone. He says that it helps make a picky engine run more evenly. I found that out when I was asking him for help in mixing my own fuel as I haven't ever done it completely from scratch. He said only add about 2-4% to the mixture. So far I have mixed 22% Castor oil, 54% methanol ("wood moonshine" he distilled himself), 20% nitro, 2% acetone and 2% lawn-Boy oil (it comes in a bottle now, no longer in a can). I have to say, my Babe Bee engine does run but not that great....yet. He claims that the engine doesn't run great because of the following factors: my first time mixing fuel (who knows what I could have messed up), the engine is not "broken in or set up" to run off the fuel yet and that a little tweaking of the formula will help. I'm not going to run it through my .051 until I know what I'm doing. Its much easier and cheaper to get a new cylinder & piston assembly and or crankshaft for a Babe Bee then it is for a early 70s TD .051. If you do come up with a good formula using these ingredients, I would like to hear it. He said that there is still some other stuff that he puts in his "race fuel" that I'm "not ready to use" including a ratio of ethanol and methanol mix. I'm guessing that he wouldn't have told me to add the Lawn-Boy oil if I didn't bring it up to him while we were mixing the fuel. He just laughed and said "damn! I'm probably the only one who adds the [bleep] to my fuel but I'll let you know how much to add just to shut you up". I'm sure that if he knew I was sharing all this on a forum, he would kill me.

Best regards -Jeff

oh my @$#%ing god! There is so many issues with this formula you are telling. for starters , the methanol that you are using if it is home distilled, IT IS NOT PURE! it mostlikely contains water that could harm the engine! Go out and buy some factory pure methanol. Also I cant see the lawnboy oil or any 2 cycle oil doing anything to make the engine run better or oil better, in fact it could be actually be slowing it down a few 100 to 1000 rpms and could create that extra carbon that can be avoided. The acetone could possibly varnish the cylinder quicker in the engine but since I have never thought of using it, I don't know for sure. I have mixed my own fuel before and for most of engines I only use castor oil, methanol and nitro. None of this extra stuff. I sure would like to hear your buddy's prized mixture. he could be just pulling your chain with the extra crap to make your engine not run as nice as you want it to just to keep you off his case. The stuff in the lanwboy can may have just been extra mixed fuel to throw off wondering eyes at the field. Ive been around, i know those tricks. The best one Ive seen was the guy who had a regular top flight prop painted neatly and that had a different logo from some company he made up. he was telling people that he spent over $1000 to have it precisely engineered to a special pitch and so on. since he was the one taking home all the trophies and awards all the time and always claiming the prop was the thing that did it for him. a lot of the other flyers including myself have looked for the company that never existed to see if we could have one made as well. one day when he was coming in for a landing, the prop hit a rock and blew apart, boy did we all feel like fools when he dipped the half a prop in paint thinner to reveal the top flight etching. boy did he laugh!

>Carl

So I decided to add a little of the lawn boy oil as an additive, about 1/2 capful to around 8oz of fuel, and it didn't do anything. I actually noticed a 500 RPM drop.

Looking at that mixture, I would agree with Carl. Aside from the mention of impurities in the ingredients, acetone will cause a lot of issues most notably rusting and improper lubrication of the ball joint.

Matt.

Matt, exactly as I thought. good to hear from someone who knows what they are doing has the answer to this whole mess. That lawnboy oil is only good for 2 stroke GASOLINE engines and thats all. jeff, your pal is full of sh-it. like i said, hes goofin with you.

what a joke

Carl

Well, that could possibly explain why the engine runs bad. I'll drop the Lawn-Boy oil and the acetone. I'll also try to get some pure methanol, the methanol I'm using is all he had and it happened to be stuff he made himself. I wouldn't be surprised if he was joking. He has played jokes on me and other pals in the past, but nothing like this. I do know for a fact that he mixes his own fuel but I never really paid attention to what he was mixing. The jar of fuel he gave me was the same jar he brought with him to the competition, that fuel was like perfect. He did come in 2nd place out of 10 today for the most entertaining. He usually does well so it could have been a thing to mess with the others. I don't get where he got the idea for acetone though. He was telling me earlier to go and buy those little burners that caterers use to keep food warm and dump the denatured ethanol out of them and try that in my mix. I'll mix up a new batch of fuel without the Lawn-Boy oil and the acetone and let you know if the engine runs better.


Best Regards, Jeff

Jeff,

Yeah, the Lawn Boy oil was sort of different....but I do like experimenting

Could be a joke since acetone would be rough for the engine.

Would be cool to see your results on your new batch of fuel.

Matt.

I have another reason that lawnboy could not improve performance it is because if he is using it as the lube then it should not be igniting with the rest of the mix and if it is an additive to boost performance it will not be lubricating the engine so I think your friend is pulling your leg I would say he is mixing random hinge in front of you and then pouring it down the drain and putting in some 35% nitro or maybe higher one way you could tell if he is using the fuel he told you he is using if you can smell ether it has a pretty distinct scent and is noticeable when compared with regular glow fuel but a while back I bought 2 cox .049 and ran one on 20% nitro and 2O% castor and the other on 20% nitro 20% synthetic and after about 2.5 litres of fuel through each of them the wear was almost Identical.

Well, I mixed up a new batch of fuel. 20% nitro, 25% Castor and 55% methanol. The engine ran 100% better! It doesn't seem to run as good as it does off my store bought Byron 1/2-A fuel. Yeah, I told him to stop over just a little bit ago and I showed him this forum topic. He just smiled and laughed. He said he tried the Lawn-Boy oil a long time ago when experimenting with different fuels and it didn't work, he just does that at the field to see how many people try it (kind of like what Carl was saying). He still claims that the acetone will make the engine run more evenly and that there is a few sites that tell you how to mix fuels that say to use it in picky engines. I can't seem to find any site that says so. I asked him if he was joking about the denatured ethanol out of those little burners and he said that that is actually good ethanol and you could use it for fuel mixing. I was going to try that but I want to make sure first that it really isn't a joke and that it is safe to use in fuel.

Best Regards, Jeff

Jeff,

That sounds about right to me!

I'm still not sold on the acetone, and wouldn't recommend it to my customers, but if he likes it

Matt.

Most of those alcohol food warmers I've seen have a gelled fuel in them. I buy my methanol by the gallon from a chemical supply company downtown. I have heard that some people use the denatured ethanol that you can get by the can from most home improvement stores in the mineral spirits isle near the paint. Although I have also heard NOT to use that alcohol. I know that our local hobby shop sells pint sized bottles of methanol at a rip off price of $6.00 each but if you don't want a lot of it and don't want to drive downtown then you get that. I can also get "nitro-shots" from the hobby shop, they are 8oz bottles of pure nitro for $15 (also somewhat a ripoff). I used to be able to get pure nitro by pint from the chemical supply company but just 2 years ago they ask to see a handling license or the approved paperwork to purchase it even when you tell them what your doing with it. I'll just have to buy it from Klotz. The Castor oil is no issue, I usually just buy it from the hobby shop. I don't mix fuel much, just to play around with it. I usually just use Sig 25% (1/2A).

I would not run acetone as it is pretty corrosive and if any thing I would like to make glow fuel less corrosive not more but ethanol can you run that through glow engines on rc universe I started a thread about glow fuel alternatives and we started talking about ethanol and some said it didn't mixed
well with other ingridients In glow fuel but maybe denatured will be different but on the subject of fuel additives I have heard that if you mix petrol 50/50 with methanol and add 20% castor oil you will have an alternative fuel that nearly all glow engines can run some better that others lie I would not run this through cox engines only maybe an os or car engine.

He insists that I post these websites that say to use acetone in the fuel. Personally I believe you guys, I'm not going to use it.




Regards, Jeff