I was looking in Halfords earlier (see also Robbie's thread) with a view to buying some oil for my Suzuki 500, and got to wondering if the 'motorcycle oil' available was any different to the other oil, which comes in slightly larger containers for much the same price.
Bikes do have slightly different requirements (wet clutches and integral gearboxes, mostly) but does that require different chemistry, or is this just old wine in new bottles?
Lastly, the grade asked for is 10W-40, but most of the 'better' oils are 5W-40, which presumably can only be an improvement?
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Many bikers - including despatch riders who clock up high mileages - use car oil instead of branded motorcycle oil. I have heard that it can cause wet clutches to slip, but I have never known anybody to have this trouble when using car oil. An American bike magazine ran some tests a while back comparing car and bike oil and came to the conclusion that there was no difference. The article is on the net somewhere if you do a search.
I personally use bike oil, but I would have no qualms about filling up with car oil if that was all I had.
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A very interesting subject -
Bike engines are very different to cars.
Until recently, car engines were very much ahead with regards to ancillary equipment, electronic management / fuel injection etc, but engine internals have been fairly basic.
In comparison, bike engines have been fairly basic on ancillarys, carbs etc, but very more advanced internally.
Yes, the bike normally has a wet clutch and shared gearbox, it's internals are also very light weight, will happily take double the rpm of most car engines, give double the bhp per litre, and do all that with half the oil capacity of a car engine.
Although bike and car engines are growing closer in recent times, i still think that the bikes demand a hell of a lot from the oil, and for that reason i would suggest that the best oil to use is the best availible brand within the manufacturers recomended range.
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Rebel is right, most modern bikes place far more demand on their oil than car engines. In particular air-cooled engines where much of the cooling requirement falls to the oil.
A good bike oil will also have an effective detergent element. In fact diesel engine oils can often be used in place of bike oils. Shell Rotella is sworn by by some of my mates.
An old clunker may be fine on car oil, but it's an old clunker anyways.
The adage was that API SH was generally the one for bike oils, since SJ had the extra friction reducers for cars which caused clutch slip in wet clutches. I think this one has largely gone away now, for example Mobil 1 4T for bikes is API SJ.
I can only endorse Rebel's last para. Stay with superior bike oils, Repsol, Red Line, Motul, Mobil 1 and your bike will thank you for it. I would never buy anything with a generic brand on it for my babies just to save a few pennies.
PS: ever wondered what happens to all that old oil when you get yours changed at your local gas station?
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To repeat a point I just made on another thread, my Kawasaki dealer recomends 10W-40 semi synth for all normal use (says synth has no advantages over 4k change intervals) and only 0W-30 synth for racing where reduced friction offers slightly more power though potentially at the expense of engine longetivity.
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I use Halfords fully synthetic because my bike deserves no better!
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I also use halfords fully synth and get it when its on half price offer, around a quarter of the price of bike specific synthetic. I don't think I've ever seen a motorcycle owners manual that says you have to buy supdaduper motorcycle only oil or even synthetic. My oil change interval is 4000 miles on the R1 and 2000 miles on 'thumper' I change it at the recommended interval. 75k miles so far and still running sweet.
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Thanks, G. I did wonder about diesel oils - I'll look more closely next time. After all, if they can cope with life inside a diesel engine... :-)
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Thank you all - interesting as ever. My general view on oils is that you generally get what you pay for, but the law of diminishing returns also applies, on top of which, changing more frequently does more good than leaving the most expensive oil in for longer. Not that I intend to skimp, but I don't want to pay over the odds for something whose benefits only kick in after 10k miles!
The stuff the dealer put in 3.5k ago is still amazingly clean, so perhaps I should find out what it was...
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Didn't the original mini share it's gearbox and engine oil? I used Halfords semi-synth in my YZF750R regularly for 30,000 miles and the clutch only displayed normal wear, it dragged a bit if anything rather than slipping. Since car oil exceeds the SG rating of bike oil I'd suggest the argument about shear, etc, wasn't relevant.
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11 years old, but I have read similar viewpoints that are more recent.
Interesting stuff at
www.xs11.com/stories/mcnoil94.htm
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Thank you, Tom.
Hard to argue with their conclusion that "..it seems to be nothing more than a clever marketing ploy designed to enhance their products' image and separate motorcyclists from their money" which is pretty much as I suspected!
I wonder if the same applies to 'diesel' oils... :-)
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"Didn't the original mini share it's gearbox and engine oil?"
Indeed. One of the reasons it made such an 'orrible racket!
IIRC, so did some of the smaller Peugeot engines (as fitted to the 1.1 Visa, for instance) although they seemed to have cracked the gear whine...
I'd always understood that the gears 'chopped up' the long chain molecules used to extend the viscosity range, although I'm not clear why synthetics should be any better in this respect. Perhaps that's why semi-synths are regarded by some as sufficient for bikes, with more frequent changes being the compensating factor.
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Topics guaranteed to create heated debate, in order of effectiveness:
1. Car oil used in a motorcycle
2. Politics
3. Religion
4. Abortion
You will never get a definitive or even satisfactory conclusion when covering any of the above.
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