Wanting to do an Oil Change

Depends on whether the crankshaft is a rolling element design or a
plain bearing type.

My GS-1100 has a roller crank. Normal oil pressure is greater than 1.42
psi, and less than 7.11 psi at 3000 RPM. (1)

My FZR has plain bearings and there's a pressure relief valve that
opens between 56 and 67 psi to bypass excess oil pressure around the
filter.

The valve on my GSXR relieves at 43 to 85 psi when the oil is 140
degrees F.

So, I have no problem believing that a crappy Fram filter with two
factory-buggered threads could blow off the filter spigot during a warm
up lap on a cold day.

(1) I installed a set of Vance & Hines oil pump drive gears that
increased the GS-1100's pressure to about 15 to 30 psi to protect the
camshafts and sliding rocker arms.

The GS-1100 uses a paper cartridge filter inside a cavity in the
engine, there's no danger of that filter blowing off, but a poor
quality paper filter could come apart and plug oil passages.

When I crashed in somebody else's oil that knocked the aftermarket oil
pressure gauge off the side of the engine, and riding the motorcycle
three miles to a 7-11 store pumped all the oil out of the engine, but
it wasn't damaged.

A Yamaha mechanic had been changing the oil on a customer's machine,
but was called away to answer the phone and forgot to tighten the plug.

The owner took his machine for a spin up a twisty canyon road and
noticed he had no oil pressure, so he made a u-turn in the middle of
the road and oiled the other side.

When I came around a tight turn at 55 mph in the dark, I slid in his
oil, thought I'd recovered, and then got into the oil in the other lane
and the motorcycle low-sided, throwing me onto the pavement.

I got to the 7-11 store and called a tow truck. The guy who'd lost his
oil plug was there in the 7-11 parking lot and he was oblivious to what
had happened to me.

When the tow truck arrived, he told the driver that he didn't need a
tow truck and sent him away!

Fortunately, I found a bolt on my machine that had the right thread to
plug the oil gallery hole where the aftermarket pressure gauge had
been.

I bought 4 quarts of oil and rode home. Between the two of us, that
canyon road was well-oiled...

 

I remember when the 3-4 gear pair on my RZ-350 developed a rough surface
and started eating shift forks. I was like "aw CRAP, where the hell am I
going to find this, and how much of a Queen's ransom is it going to
cost?"

Turns out the modern Yamaha Banshee quad has the exact same bottom end
as a RZ! It's essentially an RZ-350 motor w/o a power valve. So the
necessary gear, fork, and shims were a mere pittance. No pun intended.

-gc

 

Tell me about it. I just discovered a Moto Guzzi shop near Tampa.

I'm so jonesing to go over after the holidays.

-gc

 

Yeah, don't even get me started on car dealerships, either.

On the other hand, from reading Performance Bikes, et al, and talking to
the British contingent at work, bikes are considered mostly just another
form of transportation.

Over here, it's "anybody sensible drives a car, especially with the rain
and cold" and they're considered a rich-boy's toy so people that ride
them are considered selfish immature fools with too much money.

And unfortunately a lot of times, they are.

So the dealerships depend on fleecing morons with too much money and a
short memory, and don't develop a clientele or care much about repeat
business.

Or at least that's my experiences here in Florida (and outside Daytona)

For instance, we used to have Orlando Naval Training Center, which was
the largest US Navy boot camp behind Great Lakes.

The guys would get off the boat with their accumulated pay, go get a
GSXR-1100, the salesman would say "here's the throttle, here's the
clutch, here's the brake (don't use the front one!), it's one-down-
six-up, sign here, enjoy!!"

I *literally* saw that happen.

You could go to the local junkyard ("breakers" for the right-pondians)
and see rows of sportbikes with <600miles that had been smacked hard
into some immovable object and covered in blood.

Then the Great Time Of Military Base Closings happened and we lost our
wonderful supply of low-time racing engines. Sigh.

-gc

 

Over 130psi at racing RPM. It's the fact that there was maybe one or two
complete threads on the filter that was the painful part.

I remember looking at the pictures of the threads in RRW/MT and thinking
"how the hell did they manage to thread that ON the engine w/o noticing
something?" and "did it bugger up the thread on the engine?"

Remember: "quality control" is meant to precisely limit how much quality
gets shipped.

-gc

 

The oil pressure would only reach that level if the oil pressure relief
valve was replaced by one with a stiffer spring.

The oil filter spigot is typically machined from a different kind of
steel than the oil filter can, which has to be stamped and deep drawn
from softer flat sheet, so the buggered threads probably wouldn't harm
the spigot's threads.

One of the most disgusting slogans in quality control is "zero
defects". That doesn't mean that there are no defects, it just means
that no defects are reported.

The zero defect program was in effect at Rockwell when the B-1B bomber
was being produced to bluff the Soviets into thinking that they
couldn't win another arms race.

Inspectors weren't supposed to do anything to stop the B-1B's from
shipping on schedule.

One of the quality supervisors told me not to worry about build
quality, that Rockwell would deliver the 100 aircraft and then charge
the Air Force to fix them.

He told me that we would all be laughing about the quality
controlsituation in a few years.

He quit Rockwell and went back to Boeing a few weeks later...

A dozen years later, the B-1B was finally flying its first combat
missions over Kosovo and Iraq. The Air Force was already turning
useless B-1B's over to the National Guard by about 1998...

When I saw a Kansas National Guard B-1B on display at the Van Nuys air
show, I wondered when Kansas was going to attempt to bomb Missouri...

 

Wups, make that over 130 degrees F. Temperature, pressure, they're all
the same, right?

-gc

 

Actually I'm a retard and confused pressure with temperature. Sorry.

Oh yeah... been there, done that, got the closetfull of t-shirts.

I've watched all the management fads and been exposed to them up close
in some production facilities I had to support. I once wrote a testing
program for our SCSI interfaces that actually revealed all the problems
it had. Oops. That was a learning experience for all involved.

That's why I stopped buying American and why I buy Harbor Freight.

HF may be cheap shit Chinese tools, but at least they own up to being
cheap shit Chinese tools, and I don't expect them to be anything other
than cheap shit Chinese tools.

Plus HF sells the weird stuff you can't get anywhere else.

I just discovered today that my local Sears no longer seems to stock
metric Craftsman sockets. I went in for a 12mm 1/4" socket and NOTHING.
No non-battery drills either, they just have the cordless crap.

Oh yeah, then there's the knuckledraggers at my ISP. Newsreading is
really slow today, so I do a traceroute and the path to the news server
that's only one hop away from the far end of my connection is suddenly
going through Chicago and Atlanta before returning to Orlando. WTF?

Of course you can't tell this to first-line tech support. They just say
"reboot your PC"

Can you feel the quality?

-gc

 

<VVBG>

Sort of a Reverse Peace Dividend, eh?

 

Fascinating. If you'll excuse me, I'll X-post this to ukrmc, where there
are a few RD fans lurking furtively. I wonder what other Banshee bits
fit RDs (as we call 'em)?

More to the point, I wonder what a Banshee would be like with a set of
power-valve barrels on ti?

 

That *really* me chuckle.

(Actually, given the wayward nature of so many US bombs, they'd probably
have been aiming at Alabama at the time)

 

The Older Gentleman says...

Well known fact amongst PV owners, but not so relevant to us UK owners
as we've got loads of used parts for 350s kicking around these shores.
350 PVs aren't as common in the US and Canada, so the need to look for
an alternative supply of used parts is greater.

Slowe - the Banshee engine is in a much higher state of tune. Now I've
heard that fitting Banshee top end on a 350 PV can be quite fun.

 

Just the head, or the head with the barrels? Because GC says the Banshee
is non power-valve.

 

In

The head's fairly simple being a 2T the power valve stuff is in the barrels
in the exhaust port.

 

The Older Gentleman says...

Top end is barrels and head with appropriate pistons. Bottom end is
anything inside, and including, crankcases/outer c/case covers. Come on,
surely you knew that?

 

In a *gas* confined to a given volume, higher temperature causes
molecular motion, the gas *tries* to expand, but cannot, increasing
pressure.

But a liquid doesn't expand that much, so we can use hydraulic fluid to
transmit mechanical force without a lot of pressure rise due to
temperature increase.

We're not even trying to transmit mechanical force with engine oil,
we're just trying to conduct heat away from parts that are almost, but
not quite touching.

The buggered Fram filters may have blown off the engines simply because
of oil pressure increasing at higher engine RPM as the riders explored
the fast sections of the race track.

 

Yell, yeah, I just thought doing away with the PV would make the bike a
bit peaky.

What you want are the Banshee barrels with a PV.

 

There are still hard feelings over the run up to the Civil War, and
rebel activities afterwards. Some Kansans would probably enjoy seeing
Missouri nuked...

Kansas-Nebraska and Missouri were potentially antagonistic towards each
other since the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri to the Union as a
slave state.

For every state that was to allow slavery to be admitted to the Union,
another new state had to forbid the practice.

Kansas and Nebraska were a larger territory that was split in two
parts. Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state, where slavery
was illegal. This did not sit well with Missouri slaveholders. Nebraska
was admitted to the Union after the Civil War.

Missourans continued to make trouble in Kansas from 1850 to 1865,
especially in the southeastern corner around Lawrence. Missourans had
tried to rig elections to get Kansas admitted as a slave state.

Outlaw bands of Missouran raiders operated in Kansas. Quantrell's
Raiders even continued to terrorize Kansas after the Civil War.

Kansas was called "bleeding Kansas" in the late 1850's.

The notorious John Brown, a bible-thumping abolitionist who was
captured by Robert E. Lee at Harper's Ferry, and later hanged, started
his career by killing slave-holding Missourans with a sword in Kansas.

Missourans were by no means unified in their support of slavery or the
Confederate cause of states' rights.

My great great grandfather volunteered to join the Union army after
Confederate troops from occupied the small town of Athens in
northeastern Missouri. He and four of his five Missouri-born sons
enlisted. They fought at Shiloh and Vicksburg and chased General Hooker
around Arkansas.

Speaking of Alabama, did you know that the Confederate raider "Alabama"
was sunk in the English Channel, about five miles from Cherbourg? The
Alabama was surreptiously built in England and left the shipyards under
pretense of a short sea trial, and then began raiding Union shipping.

Confederate Admiral Rafael Semmes was my great great grandfather's
fourth cousin, once removed...

 

The Older Gentleman says...

Why? The powervalve smooths the power delivery, half the fun of a
Banshee is the way the power kicks in with a bang.

 

Fair comment, as you were, carry on that lunatic smelling of fully
synthetic 2T.