Swepco

[roelze]

Can anyone let me know your experiences with Swepco hydraulic fluid. How many years are you getting out of it. Does it turn dark and smell burned quickly? Any information would be great. Thanks

[Enters Tense Rig]

It's been a few years since I've used Swepco. I remember the fluid turning brown or burnt looking when one of our hoses was beyond it's life cycle. The detergent quality of Swepco kind of broke down the hose and dissolved it into the fluid. You may want to give a good visual inspection just incase the same thing is happening. Changing a hose on a system that uses Swepco is no fun (-as if changing a hose is ever fun) because the slightest skin exposure to it causes an irritating rash.

[guest]

Ask American Airlines. Those bozos brainwashed them.

[Ldzied]

What are the reasons you are going to the Swepco fluid from Tellus(?). We had a trainer that we ran Swepco on for many years, we did an upgrade and changed out the pumps and installed new filter housings and that alleviated our problems with the trainer. We switched back to the Tellus after the mod.

[The Pirate]

yep, gotta go with the shell/tellus, either 32 or 46. neither causes a rash, are readily available and moog/parker/paul filters work great on both. 7+ years on 4 ffs's with tellus 46, and no hose rot from the fluid, just leaks from cheap oem. fittings. it might cost to do the change, but it's worth it as far as a life cyle support advantage. leg filters every quarter, hpf's, lpf's bi-annual, etc. and no crud/slug.

[Doctor Clutch]

We?ve used Shell/Tellus for years on our CAE sims and had pretty good luck with it. Have also seen it turn dark on one occasion for no apparent reason. A long time ago we used Brako oil in some of the Singer/Link sims. Brako is not compatible with Parker hoses and seals!! Stay away from Brako!!! The Singer machines have been using Mobile DTE 24 for many years now with good results.

The burnt smell and discoloration can also come from local area heating and I think all oils are susceptible to this. If the oil is allowed to discharge under pressure through a small orifice it will heat the oil sometimes to extreme temperatures depending on the pressure and the size of the orifice. (We have a Rexroth system that does this by design to quickly heat the oil to operating temperature. When the oil reaches operating temp the flow through this port is stopped.) The port that bleeds the motion pressure off after the sim is settled is a prime candidate for this failure. If the bleed down valve is stuck open the system will continually squirt oil through that small orifice and heat the oil up. Nothing that the heat exchanger can?t keep up with so you won?t see a rise in the overall oil temp. But for a brief period the oil is over temped. There are other components that can also fail and cause this same affect. May be a good idea to contact the manufacturer of your hydraulic power plant and see if they have seen your problem.