oil can-o-worms

[cairnpath@yahoo.com]

hey list ok my .000002$ on oils i work at a shop that does a lot of race tuning(road race)so when a oil does not hold up we see this a little faster than your average street(dual purpose)bike.most of our bikes run common transmissions (oil is our tranny fluid as well)which puts a lot of shear loads on the oil.an automobile (generally speaking)does not use its engine oil for its gearbox so most car oils are not designed with these high shear loads in mind.dosent mean you cannot use them they will just break down faster and fail to do their job sooner. motorcycle specific oils are (usually)designed to be used in transmissions so they have a different additive package to help them last longer(before the tranny chews them up). there is one other type of oil that has high shear loads and that is diesels.at our shop when we break in a new motor or someone wants to run a less expensive oil we use a 15-40diesel grade oil and have had no oil related problems. we used to use a petroleum synthetic mix (golden spectro)and started to see oil related problems or race motors that were being torn down after just a few races.so after years of using that product we had to stop selling it,the savings were just not worth the risks.how many of the synthetic oils say to add conventional oil to them ina 50/50 blend?none that i know of,i just do not trust them. we use a synthetic oil (klotz-great name for a oil huh.)and have had great luck with it for the last 10+years in racing applications as well as street.is it the only oil?definatly not!i personally used to use mobil 1 (yes car oil)in the 15-50 and had no problems,their motorcycle oils are supposed to be great as well.and there are probably many others as well just do the homework and find one that you know has been tested in real world situations.we found agip did terrible things to the transmissions and that was no cheap oil so do not let price be your guide.one more caution with wet clutches if you are running a full synthetic and your clutch starts to slip try changing back to conventional oils and see if the problem goes away (it will probably buy you a little time before you do change your clutch).looking at the insides of motors that run oils from the pensylvania crudes you see a lot of deposits(parifin....wax)built up so i try to stay away from those(personal preferance).one last thing is to not keep switching from one type to another find a good oil and stay with it,not oils mix well with each other. well that was about .000002 cents.......lol eric A7 klr A1 EX500 92 851