How to Check Motorcycle Oil

Video Transcript

"Hello! This is Jerry Fishel from Vicious Cycles in Santa Clara, Utah for Expert Village. We are going to talk about now changing your oil. When you go to change your oil, you pull your dipstick and first inspect your oil. This oil actually is rather clean. We are going to change it anyway for demonstration purposes. You are always going to have a little bit of residual oil from past oil changes that runs through your motor. It is not always going to come out perfectly clean. There is always going to be a little bit of black in it. How much black in it is what matters. Now if it is a really dark or really smelly, burnt small, you want to change your oil. I suggest changing your oil every 2500 miles. Some guys go a little over that but since it is an air cool engine, oil does loose viscosity quicker than an air cool engine as they get hotter than a water cool engine, so it’s not the same as your car. You don’t want to go 3,000, 5,000 miles. It is best to go 2500. Remove the dipstick first thing because you go to undo the plug, the oil will flow a lot quicker. We want to talk a little bit about a couple of different oils. There is regular 20/50. We’ve got Harley Davidson genuine 20/50 oil. It does a great job. It does everything that it needs to do. It has a lot of sulphur in it. It dampens noise, cools down the bike; it’s the blood of your motorcycle. This is great but I prefer the synthetic oils. Like this was a Syn 3, partial synthetic oil. What this oil is it is a thinner. It cools down quicker; it cools your motor quicker. The bike will run between 10 and 15 degrees cooler with this oil or with this synthetic oil than it does over a fossil oil. One of the draw backs with the synthetic oil is that it is thinner. You will hear more engine noise because it doesn’t dampen as well, but as it is being thinner it cools faster so it cools the bike faster. We will go around to the other side of the bike and I will show you approximately where the oil plug is and how to loosen that and how to change our filter. "