Did i hear someone say Activ8? 
Is a waste of money as is all the other oil additives for any normal road use in
my opinion, modern oils contain all these so called additives already. All these claims of improved power etc, etc have been disproved or couldn't be proved by the motoring press over and over, and any proved improvements were so small as to be unnoticeable to a driver/rider think they call in the "placebo effect"! In my experience some of these additives have been found to cause poor running, increased fuel consumption, dirty emissions, even damage! How you say, they are base on compounds that have much smaller molecules hence the claim of less friction, which is true. That said however these molecules find their way past oil seals, rings and are burnt, especially turbo seals where the intercoolers are turned into oil tanks! This reduces power, increases fuel consumption and emissions plus as far as I know NO manufacturer recommends their use...........
Oils coupled with better quality materials and higher machining accuracy are areas where things have moved on massively in the last 20yrs lots of car manufactures have for sometime now increased oil changes to 20k plus even newer Porsche's! Admittedly bike oil also lub's the gear boxes and the shearing motion does degrade the oil faster but not as fast as they will have you believe. Yamaha actually increased the service intervals for the Fazer 600 in 01 from 4k to 6k and they had done nothing to it just acknowledgement of better oils and less service time.
I did some test 10yrs ago when I had access to oil testing and run my then car (Omega V6) on fully syth Mobile 1 it was still in grade and clean with minimal contamination hence it still being clean after 40K. I looked after a Hyabusa run on the same bike specific oil after 5k running on good quality semi syth it was run on fully syth tested every 3k it was still clean and in grade at 20k and he used to run it in Ultimate Super Bike as it was at the time. I'm
NOT saying you should just disregard what manufactures tell you as my experiments where under control conditions with access to all the right kit but many owners change their oil way too soon halving what is the recommended intervals. Mostly based on auto service industry recommendations based on 50 year old information why..........they sell oil and filters!
You need nothing more than a good quality semi syth even full syth is a waste in normal use in your average weather conditions, and at least stick to manufactures oil change intervals..............but if you want to add it that's your choice.
Topic: oil (Read 10480 times)
