Honda Shadow Forums : Shadow Motorcycle Forum - View Single Post - Oil weight question for MarkC
View Single Post
Old 10-06-2008, 03:52 PM   #1 (permalink)
sanoke
Senior Member
 
sanoke's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Centennial, CO
Posts: 4,455
Default Oil weight question for MarkC

Thought I'd make this public so everyone could benefit from Mark's answer.

Two of my bikes are air cooled Yamahas (XJ550, XS850). Both are spec'd to use 20w-40 Yamalube. I decided I wanted to try using Castrol GTX instead to save some money so this past summer I've been running 20w-50 in both. I'm very pleased with the results. Good shifting, very little valve wear, etc. However, it's now coming into the cooler time of the year here and last winter I noticed both bikes were sluggish to start with 20w-40. My thinking is to switch both to 10w-40 for the winter months and hopefully things will be ok. The temp here from now until spring won't get much higher than the 60's so I'm thinking the 10w-40 should work ok.

So Mark, what do you think of my reasoning here?

Happy Trails!
sanoke
__________________
If you don't have to be somewhere, you're never lost, you're just ridin around.

"UNTIL WE CROSS, RIDE ALONE WITH US" SSLB
http://www.sanoke.com
sanoke is offline   Reply With Quote