|
Beware of synthetic oil, it can do terrible things to you and your
beloved motorcycle. It will not only leak out of
your engine faster
than you can put it in, but it will also cause your oil filter to
clog and implode, dumping debris and dirt into your lubrication
system. It also will make every part of your bike permanently
slippery because of its linear molecular chain dispersion action.
Then it will leak onto your kickstand causing it to retract
automatically, dropping your bike on the ground! But that's not all...
Synthetic oil will round
off your gears and spin your bearings. It
will also splatter onto your seat causing your girlfriend to fall off
in the apex of a turn and she'll never ride with you again. Synthetic
oil coats your sight window and your timing window with a whitish
pro-emulsification additive that is both non-removable and highly
corrosive. Synthetic oil will completely leak onto the ground overnight
and your dog will drink it and die.
Synthetic oil will wear
out your tires and make your battery leak. It
will give you the desperate need to urinate after you put your full
leathers on and then jam your zippers shut. It will contaminate your
gasoline causing your bike to stall on railroad tracks and accelerate
uncontrollably near police cars. It will make it rain during rallies
and on weekends. It will lubricate your timing belts causing them to
jump teeth and break your valves to bits. Synthetic oil chemically
weakens desmodromic valves and causes the
clearances to change every
six miles. Then it melts the black soles of your riding boots right
before you walk across your new carpeting.
While riding past groups
of attractive women it will cause both of
your handlebar grips to slip off at the same time so you smash your
windscreen with the bridge of your nose. It also causes your swingarm
to crack, your studs to break, and your rotors to warp, and then it
voids your warranty by changing your odometer reading to 55,555. It
also dries out your wetclutch and wets your dryclutch. It makes your
clutch slave cylinder seal fail in the heaviest traffic on the hottest
day of the year while putting an angry wasp in your helmet for good
measure.
Synthetic oil hides your
13mm socket and puts superglue on your
earplugs. Synthetic oil will scratch your faceshield
and make your
gloves shrink two sizes night before trackday.
Synthetic oil stole
your neutral and sold it to the Chinese for $1.25. Synthetic oil
will make you grow a tail. Synthetic oil will write long crazy
e-mails to your Internet friends and then sign your name at the
bottom!
|
|
Many
passenger cars oils today are indeed different than heavy duty
and or m/c oils. Many passenger car oils today are
friction
optimized to help passenger cars meet CAFE
standards for fuel mileage
and these are the oils to stay away from in my
opinion, which are
usually the light weight oils such as 0WXX, 5WXX,
10WXX that are also
typically labeled being energy conserving or
containing friction
modifiers. Not all friction modifiers are
unfriendly to wet
clutches, but some of the ones being used and the
concentrations
they're being used in with modern day passenger
car oils have been
known to cause clutch slippage.
There's always going to be exceptions to the rule
because specialty
companies such as Amsoil,
Neo, Shaeffers, etc, don't use clutch
unfriendly friction modifiers in their oil so most
of their products
will be friendly to your clutch, but you'd still
want to pick the
appropriate weight and also an oil with an
additive package better
suited for our application. Another note is that
many of these
specialty oil companies focus on providing more or
better barrier
additives to better protect our engines in
addition to being more
temperature & shear stable, etc, when compared
to many typical off
the shelf passenger car oils.
I don't think you'll find a single 15WXX or higher
weight based motor
oil (i.e 20W50, 30wt,
40wt, etc) that will contain clutch unfriendly
friction modifiers from any manufacturer, but
again, it would be wise
to choose an oil that is
better suited for our application. Mobil 1
red cap does not contain friction modifiers and is
a suitable oil to
use in our bikes in my opinion. Many people have
had excellent
results with it, but there are many other good
choices too.
Most heavy duty motor oils that are dual purpose
(diesel & gas)
contain very stout additives packages for high
temperature, high
shear, oxidation, etc. These heavy duty motor oils
share many of the
same qualities of m/c specific oils and many of
them can be used in
our bikes with good results in my opinion. In
fact, the JASO
standard for m/c's uses a diesel injector in their shear testing.
The gearbox in a m/c is
constantly shearing the motor oil (VII's
collapsing & compressing) and modern day
passenger car engine oils
aren't optimized for shear like heavy duty &
m/c specific oils are.
You still get some shear in a passenger car in
places like the piston
rings, etc, but our gearbox is very hard on oil
compared to the
typical passenger car.
If anyone is in doubt how well their oil is
holding up for their
application, then why not get the oil analyzed?
It's simple to do
and not all that expensive, but it will give you
the facts about your
engine oil as to how well its holding up, the
amount and types of
wear materials it contains, contaminants, etc. I'm
certain my oil is
working well for me and I've been using the same
oil on and off for
nearly 20 years with great results, but I only pay
~$6/gallon for
it. Our 1980 XR80 which has been used and abused
often by people way
too big for it has ~32,000 off road miles on it
and it still has
decent compression and the original cam is still
in spec from using
this same low cost oil and its still on the
original gear box.
There's no doubt the oil I'm using isn't the best
made, but I don't
feel I need the best oil made based on my short
drain intervals for
the type of riding I'm doing and I'm quite happy
with its performance
based on oil analysis. If you really want the best
oil made, then
look into some of the newest ester technology
that's being developed
for future jet engines, but you'll be paying well
over $100 per
gallon for that stuff. Not everyone can afford
$100+ a gallon for
this stuff, but you don't have to run the best to get
excellent
results, which again can be confirmed through oil
analysis.
Federal Mogul has done studies on bearing distress
in the past and
never found a specific brand oil to be an issue,
but they did find
that dirt was the overwhelming & leading cause
of engine failure
followed by a much smaller percentage of failures
from insufficient
lubrication (lack of volume). The fact that many
of us ride 'Dirt'
bikes in the 'dirt' is probably more of an issue
to our engines than
whether we're using Mobil 1 red cap or Shell Rotella T-syn, Delo 400,
GN4/HP4, Maxima, MX4T, Kendall, RedLine, Neo, Motul, etc, etc,
all of
which are fine products in my opinion.
The benefit of synthetics including group III oils
is that they can
provide a longer service life when properly
formulated with
additives. They also offer better thermal
protection at the hot and
cold temperature extremes, which the oil may or
may not ever see, but
they provide very little if any gain in efficiency
or lubrication
protection at 'normal' operating temperatures when
compared to
lubricants manufactured from conventional base
stocks.
The bottom line is to choose a
good oil which there are plenty to
choose from and to follow the recommended
procedures outlined in our
manuals if we want good life from our engines.
It's the people who
run the light weight passenger car friction
optimized oil or the
people who simply run low on oil or the people who
don't change their
oil/filter often enough that will have the bulk of
problems and I
don't think there's many if any on this list who
fall into this
category since we're all pretty picky when it
comes to our bikes.
|