Oil type?

I like that stuff they sell at Quick-Trip .... I think it's called "recycled motor oil". ARRGGGG!

JASO-MA and/or MA-1. Some Rotella carries that rating-look for that and you are good to go.

HellFire said:

Duke you know how hard they are to crank over, the 5 weight oil helps that problem. I can't imagine trying to start a cold R3 with 15 weight oil ... even with an Odyssey.

Besides, it's not the thickness of the oil that protects moving parts, it's the pressurized oil film between them. And what builds pressure the quickest?.... thin oil.

I think alot of the R3 cranking problems would be minimized by using 5w30 synthetic, it stays runny even when it's cold.

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I agree with you about cranking over difficulties but the viscosity difference between 5 and 15 would be felt really in only cold weather , not in decent riding temperatures where we are supposed to ride .
again I speak from chatting with a triumph service manager who never saw the dark side of cold weather but he had a point . on the other hand I do not know if I would trust 5 weight sintec in yemen or saudi arabia temperatures!! all is compromise as always

You guys are really screwing me up, first you say they are removing some raisens from the cerel box now you tell me that walmart brand stuff is not as good as the real stuff what next no santa or easter bunny

Sorry man, your mother should have been the one to tell you.

Duke, that's the whole point ... thin when cold and normal when hot. The HUGE surface area in an R3's cylinders and crank (compared to another bike), get "glued" together with thicker cold-weight oils. Wouldn't it make more sense to have a thinner lubricant during cold starts that thickens up as the temps increase? Makes perfect sense to me, hence the 5w30 vs 10-15w30 motor oils.

From "How Stuff Works" ....

At cold temperatures, the polymers are coiled up and allow the oil to flow as their low numbers indicate. As the oil warms up, the polymers begin to unwind into long chains that prevent the oil from thinning as much as it normally would. The result is that at 100 degrees C, the oil has thinned only as much as the higher viscosity number indicates. Another way of looking at multi-vis oils is to think of a 20W-50 as a 20 weight oil that will not thin more than a 50 weight would when hot.

I looked it up to find someone who could explain it better than me (that wasn't hard).

See, the oil is still thinner than 30 weight when hot ... but not too much thicker than it when cold. If it's going to be as thin as hot 30 weight at operating temps, then why not have it as close to the same thickness when cold? It flows to parts faster and parts aren't spinning around waiting on thick, cold oil to get to them resulting in less wear when its
most important ... starting.

Macrider said:

Does anyone here use Rotella T synthetic oil 15W40 in thier R3?
The owners manual here says to use mobile 1 10w40.

Engine Oil
Specification
Use a semi or fully synthetic 10W/40 or lSW/SO
motorcycle engine oil which meets specification API SH
(or higher) and JASO MA, such as Mobil 1 Racing 4T​

(fully synthetiC> or MobilExtra 4T (semi synthetic>.

I do not know a lot about oil #s and am wondering what the difference is between the 10 and the 15.
The Rotella T is a lot cheaper than the Mobile 1 and easy to find at Walmart.

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Note that the owners manual says "such as Mobil..." instead of "only". Mobil 1 was at the time the preferred brand but any brand that meets the specs listed will work fine. The main thing to look for is the absence of the friction modifiers.

HF, I'm intriqued with your thinking on this. The 5w will certainly get to the parts faster but I wonder if the film is strong enough to withstand the pressures in a cold engine. When cold the tolerances between parts are generally tighter and a lower viscocity oil might not have the surface tensile strength to keep the parts apart. The oil might get there faster but if it breaks down on each wear cycle then it is no better than waiting for a thicker oil to arrive. Thoughts?

My feeling is that any oil fast is better than no oil at all. I used to have alot of upper engine failures when I was younger and using thick, sticky oil that protected well under hard loads. The thing was, while I was protecting the crank better with thick heavy oil, I was letting the cam, chain and pistons suffer from oil starvation.
I see your point, but I'll be using thin synthetics for the foreseeable future, I've had no failures in anything at all for the last 15 years. And it's not because I've gotten old and go easier on my toys, I still thrash them regularly.

And it's the oil pressure that keeps the parts apart, not the residue. I remember when I was a kid working in a salvage yard. The old owner would take a used motor that had been sitting for years and fill it with kerosene and start it. He'd let it run awhile to clean out the oil gook that hardened inside. I had a few of those apart and there was never any damage done (they were clean though). I didn't think about it then, but later on it made sense that the thin fluid got to everything even with crud in the oil passages and still lubricated the parts under pressure.

Seriously, I'm intrigued and think that you are on to something. I can't think of any flaw in your reasoning. I wonder, then, why isn't a lower weight multi-vis recommended? What do the engineers know that we don't? Or is it a question of availability? either way, I've got to consider this on the next change.

Oil

I agree with Hellfire,s logic about thinner oils.I will be using Rotella T6 synthetic 5w40 in all my motorcycle oil changes from now on.
- Shell Rotella T6 Full Synthetic
Read the part under maintenance savings