Engine oil

[nick crisp]

[quote author=nick crisp link=topic=8869.msg88664#msg88664 date=1374176996]
[quote author=Simon.Pieman link=topic=8869.msg88591#msg88591 date=1374155359]
[quote author=Fazerider link=topic=8869.msg88535#msg88535 date=1374140791]
Simon.Pieman/VNA: I have used car oil (and not the cheapest) in bikes and regretted it… not that the engine actually broke as a result, but power gradually dropped off as the cam lobes suffered excessive wear.

Castrol GTX (white can) is not strictly a car oil, it was advertised in bike magazines and MCN for many years as the stuff to put in your bike.
As for cam wear, how do you know it was the oil? many many bikes have suffered endemic cam lobe wear which is usually a hardening issue. I had a GPz900 in the eighties and almost the entire production run of the first model had premature camlobe wear for example.
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Yes, it would be useful to know if this (cam lobe wear) problem was definitely due to the oil you used, and how you can be sure of this?
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True, I can't prove it wouldn't have happened anyway.
I should have kept an identical bike running on Silkolene and ridden them alternately. Remiss of me.
As it stands it is only anecdotal evidence, it was enough to convince me that saving perhaps £2 per thousand miles isn't worth the risk.
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Hey, no one's having a dig at you here - you might have some useful information from your experience. Did you only use this oil with one bike, or more than one? If only one, ok, it's possible the oil had something to do with the problem. If more than one, and only one bike had the problem then possibly the oil wasn't to blame on balance. Was it a bike model known to have such problems anyway? So that narrows it down a bit more. So then you think, did anyone else use this oil in a bike and have the same problem? Simple deduction process. But you'll already have filed some of this info away, so when you see a similar problem or comment in the future, that's another piece in the puzzle. By the way, I'm not grilling you here, it's just that some people seem to get very frustrated with what is after all just a discussion, in my opinion an interesting one, maybe not in your opinion. So then, you don't have to get involved; add your information to the fund and leave it to boring old gits like me to pursue it if that's what we like to do   As to spending the extra for what you know and trust, that's exactly what I do. And I don't mean to sound at all condescending here - maybe my wording could be a bit better.