Did some general maintain on my bike yesterday...including oil and filter change...

With 11k now on my F2...

Got a gallon jug of Repsol, 20 w 50, full synthetic motorcycle oil at local Honda dealer...

The stuff does work much better than regular oil and better than organic HP oil...

You can tell on start up...starts cold with almost no choke...plus the thing just seems smoother...

Half of it's probably the oil...the other half piece of mind...

 

I'd like to switch to synthetic, but I'm afraid I might get some failed seals since my bike is approaching 29k.

 

why do people talk about failed seals with synthetic...i went to tech school about 4 years ago and never heard a peep about seals...now i do know never do a fresh rebuild then go synthetic...the rings wont seat right

 

That's all I have ever heard as well...not to change to full synthetic until break in is over.

 

yeah im all about synthetic...good stuff

 

Hopefully not a re-post...

[quote]We put oil in our engines to serve several purposes. First, obviously, oil acts as a lubricant. If your engine is operating correctly, there is almost no metal to metal contact - everything is riding on a thin film of oil. However, oil has several other important jobs to do. Oil circulates throughout your engine, and cools parts that cannot get near a water jacket. For example, it's becoming common in sport bikes to spray oil on the underside of the piston to cool it. There are no water jackets at all in your transmission. Motorcycle transmissions are oil cooled.

Your piston rings do not do a perfect job of sealing. Some combustion by products will slip past the rings into the engine. This can be little particles of carbon. Remember, diamond is carbon that was combined under heat and pressure. These little carbon particles can be quite damaging to your engine. Another job of your oil is to hold these particles in suspension until the oil filter can grab them.



The oil product you buy starts as a base oil. The base oil makes up about 85% of the oil you buy. The base oil can be refined from crude oil, chemically (synthetically) manufactured, or a blended combination.

Base oils that are refined from crude oil are colorless and pretty much odorless and are sold to the public as mineral oil. The crude oil is a combination of a lot of different chemicals, ranging from light gasoline types of fuels to waxes and tars. When you heat the crude oil, the gasoline and diesel oil boil off pretty early. Unfortunately, the mineral oil, paraffin, wax and tar molecules are all hooked up with each other, and it's not so easy to separate them from each other. Also, the crude oil contains the aforementioned aromatics, which are quite bad in your oil: they are very reactive, and when oxidized they cause all kinds of problems. Refining oil means trying to remove the bad stuff, while leaving the good stuff. The more bad stuff we remove, the better the oil works.



Since 1990, Chevron's process has been improved. In 1993, Chevron invented the Hydro-Isomerization process, where wax and paraffin molecules are reshaped into useful lubricants instead of simply being broken up into smaller molecules. By increasing the severity of the hydrocracking process, increasing the temperature and pressure and processing time to process more and more of the unwanted wax and paraffin molecules, the oil's low and high temperature performance and resistance to oxidation can be improved to the point where the distinction between mineral oils and synthetics becomes blurred. Chevron now licenses this process, called Iso- DeWaxing. This process of oil refining is becoming more and more popular, and in 2004 accounts for almost half of all base oils. Iso- DeWaxing not only produces much higher-performance oil, but also allows you to start with lower quality crude oil, making us less dependent on the few countries that happen to produce the purest crude oils.


Group II and Group III oils

Base oils made with the Iso-DeWaxing process are called Group II, and are significantly more pure and have higher performance than Group I base oils. Chevron Delo 400, Mobil Delvac 1300, and Shell Rotella are made from pure Group II oils. Motor oils made with Group-II base oils leave far fewer wax and tar deposits in your engine, and have much better low and high temperature performance than Group I oils. The resulting oils are roughly 97% good stuff (oil) and 3% bad stuff (paraffin and wax). We just cut that 12" dinner candle down to about 2½".

The high and low temperature performance of oils are described by the Viscosity Index. The VI tells us how much the oil thins out as it gets hot. Oils with higher VIs maintain their viscosity better at high temperatures. If the VI is 90 to 100, we call it Group II; if it's refined to a VI of 110 to 115 we call it Group IIa. In the late '90s, an even more involved pr

 

Long article short...use Synthetic Diesel oil!