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Oil dripping from air filter

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Old 03-03-2015, 09:36 AM
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Originally Posted by Foot Patrol
I have a 1997 Fatboy that I recently bought with 43K miles on it. I had the dealer service the bike including cleaning the air filter. During a ride yestereday I noticed that I had oil dripping from the air filter. They may have put oil on it after it was cleaned. My owners manual says not to put air filter oil on it. Will this hurt the performance and should I reclean it myself?

I can not see any other reason why I would have oil coming out of the air filter. Any ideas here?

Foot
When I read my owner's manual it specifies this condition and ways to reduce it. However, I would not refer to this as a 'problem that needs to be resolved' unless your bike is dripping oil all over the place. It's an expected condition and so long as you follow certain precautions like not overfilling the oil tank and of course, cleaning your air filter as scheduled in your service manual then it isn't a problem of any sort. I've owned my Softail since new in 2008 and began to notice this right away. I had already read about it in my manual and the oil wasn't much more than a bit of staining on the metal face of the air filter and maybe a few drips pooled at the bottom most portion of the filter itself. After over 60k miles, my ride has suffered no ill effects as a result of this condition and I've found no need to invest money and time into trying to "fix" it. I did recently remove the rocker boxes and it was recommended that I replace my breathers with newer style ones (post 2011 I believe) which are supposed to be better able to prevent this oil blow by. They were not in stock so I just replace my gaskets and filters with stock replacements. As far as I can tell, even owners of post 2011 scoots still have the oil blow by so evidently even the newer style breathers aren't going to prevent this otherwise normal thing from happening.

When you top off your oil, go by what the dipstick tells you. You don't need to top it off to the FILL mark. So long as you're in a safe level between the FILL mark and the ADD mark then you are still within safe operating levels. I keep mine filled till it reads just over half way between the two marks, favoring the FILL level. Check your oil regularly and make sure the level doesn't drop too low. This is all normal procedure anyway.

Check and clean your air filter regularly. Every 3-5k miles. If it's the stock filter you can just wash it in a bath of water and Dawn dish detergent or you can get a mild degreaser like what they sell to clean oil based air filters such as K&N. Honestly the Dawn works perfectly (it's made to cut grease after all) and there's no risk to the filter element. Has worked for me for the last 7 years.
 
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