Originally Posted By: jeff78
Originally Posted By: alarmguy
A good reason to never use a straight weight 40 oil in a bike that doesnt recommend it.
What's the good reason? Restrictions on sump temperatures on startup? Of course - multigrade oils are specified to ensure the oil can flow at subfreezing and far below freezing temperatures. Imagine if owner's manuals recommended monogrades - that section would be full of restrictions, cautions and caveats.
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Not sure of the purpose.
It was originally an experiment to see how the bike would like VR1 (as I've never tried it before), and how a monograde would behave in terms of shifting degradation over the OCI. Since a monograde has no VII's to shear, what I expected was that the shifting would be the same at the end of the OCI as at the beginning - and that's exactly what happened.
Also, it didn't hurt that the VR1 SAE 40 was around $5/qt on Amazon at the time.
The bike's long out of warranty and I knew I could control for startup temperatures, so using a 'non-recommended' monograde oil was no issue for me.
This bike has previously seen fills of Rotella T3, T5, T6, Motul 7100, Red Line, and Valvoline M/C oil (both synthetic and conventional versions). The VR1 ties with (maybe slightly surpasses) Red Line for best shifting over the entire OCI, at a substantially lower cost. The T6 was the worst, the other Rotellas were okay, the 7100 did not impress at all given the cost, and the Valvoline M/C oils were very very good although I did not run them out much past 3000 miles.
They say 'you never know until you try', so I tried....and now I know.
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Not exactly a great UOA but its not the oils fault
What does a 'great' UOA look like? I was mostly curious about the amounts of Zn and P, and what the viscosity would be. I was surprised at the higher-than-spec numbers of Zn and P, and the viscosity was what I expected it to be - the same as it was when the oil was new. I'm not really concerned with 'wear metal' levels, as long as they're not absurdly high.
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Of course it warms up faster, the friction of the thick oil causes that.
I see this as an advantage.
I ran the numbers a while back - SAE 40 is thinner than a typical 20W-50 at freezing and above. So in that temperature range, if an engine doesn't have a problem with 20W-50, it won't with an SAE 40.
GREAT, great reply, thanks, now I understand what you were striving for as well as you looking into the viscosity at freezing and above.
Having owned 2 metric bikes before the current one, I fully understand about shift quality after 2000 miles are so and I agree completely, the plain jane 20/50 Valvoline MC oil was very, very, very good at maintaining shift quality @ $5 a quart in Walmart, years ago I post a few UOAs on that oil.
So you have obtained your objective, great work, shift quality held up, yes I would have expected it as well and you confirmed it.
All with little to no increase in wear over other oils.
I truly never have thought about the viscosity of a straight weight oil at 50 degrees or so and higher being the same as a 20/50 multi-weight at 50 degrees and higher. I would love to look at some source of information or can google around myself, very interesting and I do believe you 100%.
As far as the UOA itself, to answer your question on what I think a great UOA looks like, to me and my bikes, great UOA = low wear metals.
So if you were shooting for low iron your UOA shows just average, nothing stellar about it at all BUT taking into account, great shift quality all through the life of the oil its a possible ok trade off. I dont have your bike and do not know what or if its possible to get lower numbers.
What I do not agree with others/most in here is everyone always looking at the zinc numbers ect.
I could care less what Blackstone shows as far as antiwear additives in an oil, that thinking to me is decades old, old man stuff, there are many compounds and oil formulations that can not possibly show up in blackstone reports as far as what is in the oil to prevent wear.
Also in the case of some engines there is such a thing as too much, as this leads to piston and valve deposits, as an example only, piston aircraft engine oils contain
NO anti wear metals at all and whatever they do use does not show up in blackstone reports, ex. zinc = 0
So Blackstone can not detect them, piston aircraft makers are concerned about piston deposits leading to engine failure, so no antiwear metals are used, none, zero, zip.
So my feeling is, all these low zinc oils being used by millions of automobiles on the road are not being affective by low zinc as they are more reliable then ever since the internal combustion engine was invented.
To me, to focus solely on zinc is old thinking, in fact the best antiwear agent in ANY motor oil is the oil itself, as a properly designed engine will last a long time and looking for an oil to make up for engine design isnt going to work. But again, in your case, shift quality, yes, I can see that and seeing nothing wrong with the extra zinc but I wouldnt buy the oil for the zinc, I would buy it for the shift quality.
Click = Example, aircraft not falling from sky using oil without anti wear metals
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