Well I called today to discuss 15w40 with the shell guy. I basically came down to if you have a water cooled bike that needs 10w40 then Rotella is a good oil for your motorcycle.

Also he recommended a motorcycle oil for my air cooled engine. I asked what the difference was. He said they have stopped some of the additives in auto oil to save the catalytic converter in cars, and motorcycle oils have not removed these wear protestants.

He said if he were to recommend auto oil it would be Pennzoil 20w50 for the Harley, but kept repeating the "motorcycle" specific oil.

Straight from the horses mouth.

I then asked doesn't all bikes made today have catalytic converters in them? Then why would I use an oil that would destroy my exhaust, and why would the EPA allow motorcycle oil to have additives that would destroy the Cat, but allow them to be removed to save automobile's cats. He didn't have an answer.

SWTH? Paying anything near $10 for a quart of oil Syn or Dino is robbery.

 

Who was this masked "shell" guy? The dude working the full service island? A know it all manager? Or a chemical engineer from Shell Coporation?

 

Like I posted in another rottellla thread------------the oil has had to have lots of the ingredients in the detergent package taken out to prevent it plugging the DPF on semi trucks up.Auto oils in my eyes need to be in cars and not motorcycles due to additive packages that dont cater to the extra heat and different wear on a car engine.If you look at the api specs you would see the differences.Then my next thing is what rotella guy did you talk to a factory rep or another dealer rep.Rotella has a traveling group of reps that hits trade shows that when they cant give you a specific answer they call their engineers to find out.I would say this guy wasnt the latter recommending you dump sludge in your engine

 

Pennzoil is not sludge. That is all myth.

But I called the Tech Support line option 4 option 1 spoke with a woman, and then Mike an Engineer Tech.

I really am not trying to stir the pot here, hence the warning in the thread headline.
I say that Pennzoil 20W50 is fine from what I have seen in the 500 miles since I put it in. My question is since all bikes come from the factory with Cats, why do Motorcycle oil not remove the same additives to keep from destorying the Cat, if in fact that is what they are doing to save the cars Cat. Now is the auto's cat different than the cycle's cat?

I wish I could find Valvoline MC oil Autozone use to have for $2.50 per qrt about 2 years ago. That was good stuff.

If all this BS keeps twisting in circles, and everyone says $12/qrt oil is the only way to go, then i am going to the local Yamaha shop and buying a gallon of Yamalube for $18.00, and then I might add some otc addatives (probably not) and just run that. That oil is SG rated, and can be used in the primary for sure. The transmission will coninue to use 20W50 Amsoil or some brand of 75w110 Syn gear oil. Believe it or not in my resear, I have read good things about 75w90 Supertech $5.98 and Supertech 75W110 Syn $11.56.

Trying to research oil and get straight answers is by far about as close to investigation who show JFK as anything I fan compare it to.

When I had my Yamaha's Virago's, etc. Yamalube worked awesome. So did the Valvoline MC oil for $2.50 from Auto Zone. Like I said, I may have to go down that road again. After all Yamalube is designed for air-cooled motorcycles.

 

I am just going off of my experience running a automotive machine shop with my shop business.In a irrigation engine or even a passenger car engine the engines that used penzoil were allways the worst ones to go into the hot tank.Second behind that was COOP oil.We built a fair amount of irrigation engines that ran on natural gas and experimented with all oils to try and find something that didnt make the inside look like a coal mine.The top performers we found were the oil John Deere sold from ashland oil,universal lubricants oil from wichita ks.and then havoline .The havoline looked like it left a gold plating of varnish in the engine in the corners but wasnt coal Mobil was also a strong performer.The oils we picked to try were all available in bulk and various weights for different engines.The other brands tried were Quaker state, penzoil, Napas house oil, lubriplate,Amsoil, mobil.Red Ram.


now this isnt scientific or relative to the HD world just a observation