oil change

[joyghosh]

Does synthetic oil do any good for real? My kat is 2004 kat 600 with 4K miles on it now. Do I get any benefit with synthetic oil over regular one?

[Mojoe]

personally, I would not use synthetic oil in any bike with a wet clutch system. I heard that over time you will screw your clutch. maybe true....maybe not.

[hellcamp]

Search. It's all been discussed extensively.

[KatanaSoldier]

I use regular MC oil in the Kat and she has yet to have problems. But then again I use only synthetic in the truck and no problems there either!







typo edit

[katman05]

I use semi synthetic, a happy medium between the two.

[Minitruck1506]

Use the semi synthetic its a little cheaper and you get the benefit of both. Plus I don't think it will mess with your clutch as much.

[The CyberPoet]

A motorcycle-specific synthetic will usually give you smoother shifting and better protection for the long-haul, and it won't affect your clutch. It'll normally also have a higher vapor temperature as well (which is a good thing in an air-oil cooled bike like the Kat).

To really understand what they mean by "synthetic", you have to consider "synthetic" as "not occuring in nature". Traditional motor oils have molecular chains of varying lengths, and only some of those are the ideal length to actually do the job of lubricating particularly effectively. A synthetic (as the term is applied in the USA) means that the molecules are all the same length at the time it comes out of the bottle, meaning all the oil molecules are the ideal length for lubrication at the outset.

There are certain advantages of having all the oil molecules start out the perfect length -- it'll take longer for a large enough number of them to be broken down to the point that oil isn't lubricating sufficiently. It also permits the manufacturers to bundle a larger quantity of detergents and other beneficial additives, because they are starting out with a higher percentage of effective lubricating molecules (to put that another way, if Brand X Dino Oil has 70% ideal length and adds 1% detergents, you have 69% ideal lubrication coverage by volume -- if Brand Y Full-Synthetic adds 4% detergents [4 times as much as Brand X], they still have 96% lubrication coverage by volume, a much higher amount PLUS they have a much higher detergent load).

Obviously there's a lot of work involved in coaxing all the molecules to be the same exact length, and there's a couple different ways of doing it (building the molecule chains from scratch, or taking existing chains and breaking the longer ones [cracking] & joining the shorter ones [binding] until they are all ideal length). It doesn't really matter how they get all of the molecules the same "ideal" length, what matters is that they are more effective than the alternative for your purposes.

Cheers,
=-= The CyberPoet