My rational is similar having read and spoken to specialists like Rich at Louigi Moto. As a result I favour a good quality 15/50 fully synth or even semi and warm bike up gently for several minutes before even starting to ride it. Even then I go easy till it's properly up to temperature. However, I do love in the relative balmy climate of the South West
Agree, I always fire the bike up then proceed to lock the garage, put helmet & gloves on, push bike up the driveway, close the gate, by this time it’s been running for a good couple of minutes then ride gently for the first 4 or 5 miles, as others have said regular oil changes can’t hurt, I tend to half whatever oil service interval the manufacturer recommends, especially on my air cooled bikes, my Fireblade had done 67k miles when I sold it and still ran like a new un
Thanks for all the comments, oil threads always make interesting reading. I went with the Halfords stuff and bought some Shell Advance Ultra for the 900IE
I saw the results of some detailed oil analysis earlier this year and it showed that changing the FILTER every 1,000 miles was far more effective. iirc the test was basically - run two 'identical' engines on the first engine keep the same oil and filter for 4,000 miles, on the second engine change the filter (only the filter) every 1,000 miles for 4,000 miles. After the 4K miles limit was up on both engines the oil from both engines was analysed and, no surprises, the one with the frequent filter changes exhibited significantly fewer damaging deposits suspended in the oil. Not bad for a 5 quid filter change.
I also change filter every year regardless of mileage but this is very interesting. Perhaps a mid year filter change too
FWIW I use Mahle OC-5 filters, I think they are at least as good as the Ducati branded filter (they look identical) and they cost a fiver.
I use Mann 712/9 or ideally 712/11 as they are slightly longer to make removal easier. Also cheaper than Ducati OEM
The filter suggestion is interesting, but it implies that the performance of a filter deteriorates rapidly, in the sense of its ability to filter out particles. That's a bit counter-intuitive because I'd have thought the more serious risk of prolonged avoidance of filter changes would be clogging with particles (so risking reducing oil pressure). I suppose the implication is that after 1000 miles a filter is still taking particles out reasonably well, and not yet starting to release much of what it's already collected back into the oil. Then, by changing it, leaving the same oil, you're taking out one batch of old particles inside the old filter, and immediately putting a new filter in, supposedly with better abilities, which will immediately "recapture" all of the particles that the previous filter had not caught, or had released again.
I agree with your rational, but I personally couldn't be doing with the faff of catching part used oil and putting it back in, just so as I could change the filter. Modern good quality filters should be more than capable of lasting up to 6k miles with reasonable efficiency. If you were going to go to the bother of shortening the interval between filter changes, then you'd just as well change the oil too at the same time. I work on the basis that oil changes are cheaper than rebuilds up to a point, but I wouldn't loose too much sleep over halving manufacturers recommended intervals. Just my two penneth anyway.
Yeah I wouldn't lose sleep over a road engine either, but if you have an expensive race built and every last HP matters then...
