XPS oil for 912iS

XPS oil has been around quite a while for BRP engines in other machines. The ATV shop I just went to has a bunch of it. I believe the formula was changed for the Rotax engine.

Hi Caleb,

I don’t think the oil change intervals changed. RW may be able to shed more light on this.

Oil changes did not change.  Also the XPS "aviation" oil is not at all the same as other XPS products blended for ATV and Sea-Doos.  This oil is made to a spec that Rotax had to define specially for the 916.  It is not a automotive or motorcycle spec oil with a different label.  There were literally thousands of hours of testing on both dyno and flight engines.  It had to work with both leaded or unleaded fuels and be full synthetic to withstand the oil temperatures of the type 916.

Cheers

https://www.flyrotax.com/p/products/rotax-xps-oil

In a conversation with an engineer from ExxonMobile, he described to me the difference in conventional and synthetic oils at the molecular level in a way that was easy to understand.  He said for conventional oils, picture a mixture of ping-pong balls, baseballs, tennis balls and soccer balls, whereas a full synthetic oil would look like all ping-pong balls. This makes it easy to visualize that synthetic oil uses a much “smoother” base stock, which is why it’s more prone to leaking through seals, and won’t suspend lead. From a purely academic curiosity, it would be interesting to know what modifications were done to XPS to make it suspend lead, though I’m sure that is proprietary. 

Rotax Wizard wrote:

Oil changes did not change.  Also the XPS "aviation" oil is not at all the same as other XPS products blended for ATV and Sea-Doos.  This oil is made to a spec that Rotax had to define specially for the 916.  It is not a automotive or motorcycle spec oil with a different label.  There were literally thousands of hours of testing on both dyno and flight engines.  It had to work with both leaded or unleaded fuels and be full synthetic to withstand the oil temperatures of the type 916.

Cheers

https://www.flyrotax.com/p/products/rotax-xps-oil

Hi RW,

I thought this was true, but wasn’t 100% sure. Thanks for clearing that up.