Well, maybe black….and back to a slippery subject…

Yeah, I’m having a lot of fun with these new bikes and the Nikon…and now I’m back to thinking maybe black is the fastest color!

Okay, while you’re pondering the TT250 color palette, let me turn back to a prior subject:  The oil/air separator.

Gerry flipped the oil/air separator on my bike this week (the day I posted about it) to the factory-specified correct orientation, and he did an oil change for me, too.  Instead of the 10W-40 synthetic I normally use, Gerry put in 20W-50 synthetic.

After the oil change and putting the oil/air separator in the correct orientation, I took my bike out and put 80 hard miles on it.  My separator drain tube used to always have a good inch or so in it after every ride, so I was eager to flog the bike and see what happened with the separator in the correct orientation.   My ride was aggressive.  I charged into the San Gabriels with three objectives – to narrow the chicken strips, to keep the revs up, and to not crash.   After 50 miles in the mountains, I picked up the freeway and ran at an indicated 80+ mph to make a late afternoon reliability engineering class I teach at Cal Poly.   Then it was home in rush hour traffic, running from stop-and-go when I couldn’t split lanes to maybe 40 mph when the traffic moved a bit more easily.   The bottom  line?   After 80 miles my drain tube was bone dry.  There was not a drop of any liquid in it.   It’s the first time that’s ever happened.

The next day, Gerry and I spent a bunch of time discussing the separator and examining an RX3 with the tank removed.  Here’s why:  I have observed that when folks drop their bikes (and I observed a lot of dropped RX3s on the Baja runs and the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride), on more than a few occasions the drain tube immediately filled.   My thought was that somehow fuel was getting into the tank vent lines and finding its way into the line that runs from the airbox to the separator.

Gerry convinced me that what I imagined can’t happen.  The bike just isn’t plumbed in a manner that would allow the tank vent lines to feed the drain tube.  But I know what I saw, and I saw that drain tube fill after bikes were dropped.   Gerry (who is a hell of a lot smarter than I am) figured out what was happening:  With the separator in the wrong orientation, it’s possible for a lot more liquid to get into the line that runs from the separator to the airbox.  That line has a bit of a drop along its trip to the airbox, and it probably acts as a trap.   Gerry’s theory was that vented liquid from the crankcase was laying in that line, and when the bike went over, the liquid flowed to the drain tube.  It makes sense to me.  It’s something that would be aggravated with the separator installed upside down.

I don’t know if this might also be a consideration, but I suspect a lot of people are overfilling their bikes with oil.   I know you know this is not the case for you, but hear me out on this.   The correct procedure is to let the bike fully warm, then let it idle for one full minute, then shut the bike off, then wait one minute, and then check the oil level in the viewport with the bike perfectly vertical.   I’ve posted on the blog about this, but I also know a lot of people just look in the oil viewport without using this procedure.  If they don’t see oil (or the oil level is lower than they think it should be), they just dump more oil in.  I’ve seen this happen on the rides I’ve led.  Guys would complain their bikes were either using oil or the oil level was going up, and it was doing neither.  The RX3 has a dual chamber oil reservoir (it’s a pseudo-dry-sump system), and the factory boys in China tell me you should check the oil the way I describe here.   I do it that way, and it works for me.

One last note on this oil checking business:  All bikes are incredibly sensitive to any angle off perfectly vertical when checking the oil.  You can lean the RX3 a very tiny bit off of perfectly vertical and the oil level will move a lot in the sight glass.  You need to make sure your bike is vertical when you check the oil.

Oh, and that 20W-50 synthetic oil Gerry put in my bike?  It’s the cat’s meow.  The bike is smoother, it shifts better, and it finds neutral more easily.   I am really impressed with the difference it made.