Which Engine Oil

[fixitsan]

I agree with everything said about engine life/wear issues so far. I'm not sure I can agree that motorbike engines subject the oil to more sheer force than car engines, but there may be some evidence of that which I just haven't seen yet.

 

My only concern with using 'any available oil' is where clutch performance is concerned. Admittedly it was an old bike which I had clutch problems with, a Kawasaki kz550ltd, but with fully synthetic oil and 'super slippery' formula additives I got a lot of clutch slip. Ditched the oil for Castrol GTX and the problem went away. But even GTX is getting a few more additives these days.

 

Oil choice can also affect catalyst life too.

 

The FJ1100 and FJ1200 engine is renown for giving a long life, and in an FJ owners group I was a member of the recommended oil was the oil ressembling the most natural mineral oil, which for one guy who raced his bike was B&Q's finest 4-stroke lawnmower mineral oil (!)  and he raced that bike succesfully.

 

It needs to be remembered that the oil business, like all businesses, need to innovate to keep attracting new customers. Like the water industry, which makes a fortune from putting water of a lower quality than some tapwaters into bottles, and then selling it as a premium product (all legal and above board), then so the oil business also does the same.

 

Once you've extracted peak performance and made the ultimate performance claims about a product, where do you go from there ? Because once everybody has tried your product and found it to be about the same as other competitor's products it just becomes a price war after that. New products need to continually come along, and new ways of measuring performance have to come too which make the arguably small gains they bring seem to be critically important , and therefore worth paying a premium for..

 

 

 

It's all about the law of diminishing returns.....not wanting to get political, i think the oil performance improvement graph looks very similar to the CO2 effect graph....putting more 'stuff' into something stops becoming effective after a short while....

 

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