thermostat innova

How many kilometers can my Unicorn 150 run in Shell 10w40 fully synthetic oil?

The Honda Unicorn has a slightly overbored version of Honda’s 1976 125cc single cylinder OHV pushrod single. It was originally designed for third world countries where regular maintenance and good quality oil would not always be available, hence the seemingly primitive (for the 1970’s!) OHV pushrod engine design which is more tolerant of oil starvation and abuse than an overhead cam type. The engine was designed to run on an oil that behaves as a straight 40w does when at full working temperature… As indeed has every Honda engine since the 1950’s. Your engine does not have a removable oil filter, it has a centrifugal particle separator. Your engine has 4000 km oil change intervals Now… All oils are thicker when cold than when hot. If an engine wants an oil that behaves as a 40 weight does when fully hot, then the whole time that oil is warming up, it is too thick and at first start, the engine can be used hard enough for the oil to fail to protect it and accelerated engine wear will result.. A 10w-40 is MUCH thicker before it is fully hot…. Allowed to warm up for a good 8–10 kms (very gentle throttle use) that oil with give you around 40000–60000 kms of life,. However, if you use a top brand 0w-40 your engine will basically suffer NO wear at all… Yes, a decent 0w-40 fully synthetic (like Mobil 1 or Castrol) is THAT much better. It’s the ‘0w’ bit that matters. And contrary to what others may have said, a small aircooled engine is FAR harder on its oil than a larger engine and especially a larger water-cooled engine because a small engine is often asked to provide 100 percent of its output and aircooled engines are generally designed for optimum cooling at around 70 percent output. (if they were designed to cool at 100 percent then at anything less, they would run too cool….Aircooling has no thermostats!) My Yamaha is a 500cc air-cooled single. At 60 mph the oil temperature stabilises at 80 dec C after about ten miles At 80 mph the oil temperature stabilises at 90 dec C after about ten miles At full throttle the oil temperature stabilises at 100 dec C after about ten miles At 5 miles my engine oil is at half its working temperature In 1978 it was quite common for a Yamaha 500 to be smoking and burning oil due to engine wear by 15,000 miles and even a healthy but hard used SR would drink mineral 10w-40 oil at the rate of a litre every 2000 miles... Hard used means cruising at a steady 75–85 mph over the entire tank of petrol, for at least two tanks of fuel, every day. Basically, a hard used Yamaha SR500 got too hot for the oil technology of the time I know this because I rode an almost new one for a living in 1981, doing 1800 miles a week. In 1995 a hard used 1978 SR500 running fully synthetic Mobil 1 5w-50 oil used… NO oil whatsoever in between oil changes. I know this because it was my daily transport for two years. Today, a hard used 1978 SR500 running fully synthetic Mobil 1 0w-40 oil uses… NO oil whatsoever I know this because I ride one 12 miles each way to work and back every day. If a healthy engine is burning oil, then that oil is getting so hot it is no longer protecting the engine at the critical high heat points. If that is the case, you need to reduce engine heat my slowing down, OR increase oil performance by using an oil that is not going to cook at the temperatures your engine is generating inside it. What I am trying to say here is that I ride a bike that was famous for its heavy oil consumption when thrashed, I have owned and ridden three of them over the last 40 years, and have proved to myself at least, that fully synthetic 0w-40 is SO superior to ANY 10w-40 that any comparisons are laughable…. Especially in a small, hardworking aircooled engine… Which incidentally, is pretty much EVERY motorcycle engine in india And my other bike is … drumroll … a 125cc air-cooled Honda, which is thrashed at FULL output from the moment it starts to the moment it stops. That little Honda Innova has 50,000 kms on its engine and uses no oil between oil changes, and runs slightly better now than when it was new. The centrifugal oil cleaner is also impeccably clean, because decent fully synthetic 0w-40 doesn’t disintegrate into carbon and actually cleans the engine as it lubricates … In fact, when I got the Innova it had 10,000 miles on it and had been run on 10w-40 . …12 mile each way flat out commutes as it happened. In the first oil change AFTER I put Mobil 1 0w-40 in, two half circle chunks of compacted oil came out into the drain pan… That was what the 10w-40 had left behind in the centrifugal cleaner as the little engine cooked it. So… with multigrade oils, the second number should be what your handbook or the engine designers say…i.e. 40… And if you want the engine to have essentially no wear, the first number should be 0 because a 0w-40 drops to your engine’s required oil viscosity MUCH faster than a 10 or even a 5, and being synthetic, is FAR better at coping with the high heat before it gets fully thin as well