ducatipaddy
New member
An oil story
I made a comment that the EXUP above ran for 84k miles without a hiccup on Mobil 1, who knows ? maybe its still going .
I have a strange opinion of oil as a biker, I tend to think a lot of the debate about oil stems from marketing rather than success or failure of the product. Very much like the petrol debate…keep going well, keep going Shell ? yea but doesn’t most of it come from the same refinery ? Isn’t Tesco that some people will not touch actually Esso ? or was it BP ?
Don’t all oils meet a BS approval ? surely the only difference is a mix of detergents and life span ? Given most bikers change their oil every 1k miles , 2k at max it’s hard to see how any oil could deteriorate in that time under normal conditions and still hold a BS approval, even re constituted oils.
What swung it for me back in the mid 90’s was fighting an MGB that that seemed to turn its oil back into crude in 100 miles and emulsify round the filler, when I stripped the engine it was just full of burnt on carbon and sludge and the backs of the valves had huge balls of rock hard carbon on them like half size golf balls !! never seen anything like it before or since.
At the time on TV was an advert for mobil1 , fully synthetic oils were new then in car land and pretty expensive by comparison but the advert showed a bowl of mineral oil being heated over a Bunsen burner and a bowl of synthetic getting the same treatment. One burnt and turned black, the other stayed looking like oil. I was convinced.
Interestingly while changing the oil on the EXUP one day a neighbour wandered over, an old guy who didn’t figure in my thinking as a young bloke then, and started to chat, oh god thinks I, if he says how fast does it go I will deck him !! but surprise surprise he explained how he had worked on the development of mobil1 and had seen the bottle next to my bike. He was fascinated to see it had reached Halfords as when he retired it had been cutting edge (excuse the pun) and way beyond the motorists reach in price. Turns out he had worked for Mobil on the Concorde project where they had found mineral oils just didn’t cut it at extreme temperatures of a RR Olympus cruising at 60,000ft and Mach 2.2 for 3 hours, outside temp at that height could be -60C while skin temp of the aircraft would be about +100c and exhaust temp near white hot…..
I started to think about the temp extremes of the EXUP on a bad day and realised even Mobil1 was probably a little over the top but I was bowled over by the non burning add.
The picture above in the previous post shows the EXUP having its 50k mile service…which was a strip and check, wheel bearings head race bearings etc as a matter of course but worst of all the dreaded valve shim check. I can only say when I stripped the top end the whole engine was shiny new inside. No evidence of burning or sludge or varnishing, the whole engine looked like it had been ultra-sonically cleaned inside.
TBH that’s good enough for me and apart from viscosity variations for different engines I have always used synthetic oils since.
Anyway, just a thought I thought I would share
I made a comment that the EXUP above ran for 84k miles without a hiccup on Mobil 1, who knows ? maybe its still going .
I have a strange opinion of oil as a biker, I tend to think a lot of the debate about oil stems from marketing rather than success or failure of the product. Very much like the petrol debate…keep going well, keep going Shell ? yea but doesn’t most of it come from the same refinery ? Isn’t Tesco that some people will not touch actually Esso ? or was it BP ?
Don’t all oils meet a BS approval ? surely the only difference is a mix of detergents and life span ? Given most bikers change their oil every 1k miles , 2k at max it’s hard to see how any oil could deteriorate in that time under normal conditions and still hold a BS approval, even re constituted oils.
What swung it for me back in the mid 90’s was fighting an MGB that that seemed to turn its oil back into crude in 100 miles and emulsify round the filler, when I stripped the engine it was just full of burnt on carbon and sludge and the backs of the valves had huge balls of rock hard carbon on them like half size golf balls !! never seen anything like it before or since.
At the time on TV was an advert for mobil1 , fully synthetic oils were new then in car land and pretty expensive by comparison but the advert showed a bowl of mineral oil being heated over a Bunsen burner and a bowl of synthetic getting the same treatment. One burnt and turned black, the other stayed looking like oil. I was convinced.
Interestingly while changing the oil on the EXUP one day a neighbour wandered over, an old guy who didn’t figure in my thinking as a young bloke then, and started to chat, oh god thinks I, if he says how fast does it go I will deck him !! but surprise surprise he explained how he had worked on the development of mobil1 and had seen the bottle next to my bike. He was fascinated to see it had reached Halfords as when he retired it had been cutting edge (excuse the pun) and way beyond the motorists reach in price. Turns out he had worked for Mobil on the Concorde project where they had found mineral oils just didn’t cut it at extreme temperatures of a RR Olympus cruising at 60,000ft and Mach 2.2 for 3 hours, outside temp at that height could be -60C while skin temp of the aircraft would be about +100c and exhaust temp near white hot…..
I started to think about the temp extremes of the EXUP on a bad day and realised even Mobil1 was probably a little over the top but I was bowled over by the non burning add.
The picture above in the previous post shows the EXUP having its 50k mile service…which was a strip and check, wheel bearings head race bearings etc as a matter of course but worst of all the dreaded valve shim check. I can only say when I stripped the top end the whole engine was shiny new inside. No evidence of burning or sludge or varnishing, the whole engine looked like it had been ultra-sonically cleaned inside.
TBH that’s good enough for me and apart from viscosity variations for different engines I have always used synthetic oils since.
Anyway, just a thought I thought I would share
thats how long ago it was..
