My last oil change was one year ago 5-28-12

[BarryG]

It's been 4K miles and 1 year ago tomorrow since I changed the oil. I plan on doing it this week.

I've been running Castrol Syntec full synthetic 10W-40 for the last 5 years since I got the bike, changing it out every 5K miles....that's usually every 8 months until this year....been obviously riding less. The oil still looks fairly clean and the bike isn't consuming oil. I don't ride the bike that hard either. 90% is commuting and I never sit in traffic.

Have I been a really naughty boy or this no big deal?

[Chewtoy]

I change every 3k, about 4x a year, but I think it's NBD.

[slowrideCX]

Your still a saint no worries....

With full synthetic you will be fine for at least 10k I usually change my oil once a yr with Mobile1 and it used to be about 8k but the last couple yrs have only been about 5k

I have not gotten to ride nearly as much as I want too.

[RXX]

Your still a saint no worries....

With full synthetic you will be fine for at least 10k I usually change my oil once a yr with Mobile1 and it used to be about 8k but the last couple yrs have only been about 5k

I have not gotten to ride nearly as much as I want too.

Pretty much the same here. Owner's manual says every 8k with dino oil, so I do mine annually in May no matter what the mileage. I use Motul synthetic.

[jon haney]

Your still a saint no worries....

With full synthetic you will be fine for at least 10k I usually change my oil once a yr with Mobile1 and it used to be about 8k but the last couple yrs have only been about 5k

I have not gotten to ride nearly as much as I want too.

No worries. I do the same thing with Amsoil in every engine I own. Usually change in the fall before it gets cold. Better to have fresh oil in there for the (somewhat) idle months of winter.

[Zero Knievel]

I change my oil once a year. No issues if you use the good stuff.

[BarryG]

Thanks for the replies. So I guess going much longer than a year regardless of miles is not the best idea ?

[OMG]

Don'cha just love oil threads.

This reminds me of a neighbor back in the 60's. He would buy a new Ford, drive it till 100k and trade it. Changed the oil at 50K.

So from a purely technical standpoint, with modern oil, hi efficiency filters, why change oil so often?

What's the worse that could happen?

[BarryG]

Don'cha just love oil threads.

This reminds me of a neighbor back in the 60's. He would buy a new Ford, drive it till 100k and trade it. Changed the oil at 50K.

So from a purely technical standpoint, with modern oil, hi efficiency filters, why change oil so often?

What's the worse that could happen?

Fords lasted 100K miles in the '60s? Then there is HOPE for my 3yr old Mercury Milan!!

[The Krypt Keeper]

I would worry about all the engine parts that are bathing in dirty oil and just sitting there for months on end while contaminates slowly eat away at the internals of your engine.

just change the oil and ride the damn thing.

[Zero Knievel]

Thanks for the replies. So I guess going much longer than a year regardless of miles is not the best idea ?

With Amsoil I change oil once a year. With the bike, it's an oil/filter change because I rarely put even 10K on the bike in a year. With the truck, I change the oil/filter in summer and change out the filter and add a quart in winter.

[EVLXX]

10K or 1 year.

With fully synthetic, both numbers could be slid a bit higher without any worries, for instance you could go 15K and 2 years, if you wanted to.

Note: Not all Fully Synthetics are the same either.... you MUST make sure the oil you are using is rated for flat tappet engines.

http://www.mobiloil.com/USA-English/MotorO...et_Engines.aspx

Additionally.... changing your oil Too often, say every 3K miles, can actually do more harm to your engine.

Interpreting Wear Metals

Looking at a single oil sample's wear metals wouldn't impart much useful information. Frozen in time, with no trend to compare it to, it would serve solely as a pass or fail mechanism: either the wear metals are excessively high or they're not. While that's useful to know, it's only part of the story. The rate of accumulation is actually the more useful measure, as it allows us to see whether the oil's protective ability is improving or weakening. Iron, copper, and lead are the three most important wear metals, as they derive from the components most prone to wear, such as piston rings and various bearings. This chart shows the wear metal trend over the course of the Mobil 1 test. We've standardized the values so that they're directly comparable to each other.

The solid lines are the standardized cumulative totals of wear metals in parts per million for iron, copper, and lead. The shaded lines are the standardized totals of wear metals in ppm per mile -- in other words, the shaded lines represent how quickly the wear metals accumulate as compared to how quickly the miles accumulate.

While the wear metals all accumulated steadily over the course of the test, the highest concentrations of accumulation per mile occurred in the first 3,000 miles of the test! From the 3,000-mile mark all the way to 18,000 miles, only lead showed an increase in per-mile wear beyond 3,000 miles. Yet even with an increased wear rate, lead wore the least in terms of absolute wear. For iron and copper, the longer the oil remained in service, the lower the wear rate got.

In case it isn't obvious yet, this means that the most wear occurs in the first 3,000 miles.

The filter change at 12,000 miles also substantially affected the wear metals. Though changing the filter by itself wouldn't have a significant effect on the concentration of metals -- the metals picked up in spectrometric analysis are too small for a filter to capture -- the amount of top-up oil required to fill the crankcase after the filter swap substantially alters the chemistry of the oil. Iron and lead didn't reach their 12k levels for another four or five thousand miles, and copper never reached its 12k level in the remainder of the test. It's easy to see here why proponents of extreme oil changes demand filter changes at regular intervals. Indeed, one is forced to wonder whether an engine with a high-quality PAO synthetic combined with a bypass filtration system and regular filter changes would ever need its oil changed at all.

Read the rest of the article for yourself....

http://www.brianschreurs.org/neptune.space...ies/mobil1.html

[slowrideCX]

Good read. Thanks for posting....

I have heard of guys with over the road trucks just doing filter changes when using full synthetic oil for over 50k miles.

Synthetic oil doesn't break down like dino oil. So it makes sense financially.