oil evaluation

[matt glascock]

I have made the acquaintance of a product engineer from a local specialty oil company called Northland Oil. Among other endeavors, they perform the oil performance assessments for the motor engineering department of the John Deere tractor works here in town. Needless to say, the oil company has serious juice. I was originally interested in sourcing a locally available and equivalent alternative to the Bel Ray gear saver oil I run in all of my vintage bikes. For this, I provided him a sample of the Bel Ray 85W oil for spectrographic analysis. This led to a discussion of how they evaluate oil performance. Basically, this involves evaluating used oil for suspended metal, combustion products, etc. and comparing this to the fresh oil of the same brand. He keeps baseline (fresh) oil information on his database. I'm mostly interested of evaluating the used oil from race bikes which are run hard. He has no current data on Bel Ray gear oil, but once he runs the fresh sample I provided him, the comparison data will always be available. There are multiple extrapolations and conclusions to be drawn from this information. The cost of running a sample of used oil is $15.50. He is running the fresh sample gratis. If there is any interest for such a service in the greater Hodaka community, let me know. Also, if it turns out they have an equivalent high performance gear oil, I'll pass this information along. They do have a far flung distributor network (mostly auto parts stores) so if like me, you are tired of having to order oil on line, you might be able to find a local source for gear oil as well.