Which Oil do You use in your Vincent?

daveinnola

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and as for monkey pant comment on diesels can you say audi diesel one of there cars has won over two hundred races , its:eek: almost reach the status of slippery sam
 

daveinnola

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i done a search and for the life of me i couldnt find a one liter manx so your projected hp rating is just that , would have could should have , and as none of the top norton tuners try,d it i guess the v twin is vincents domain :p
 

Upstreeter

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So the general consensus seems to be 'please yourself'!

I've used everything from Sainsbury's multigrade - no longer available I believe, but recommended by the late Ian Hamilton - to whatever has been available from my local Halfords (usually Castrol of some type). I've never used a monograde oil in the Vincent but do change whatever I am using often. I change the filter after every other oil change. This of course is a complete anathema to the modern vehicle owner whose car (in the case of the Cadillac) requires its first oil change at 100,000...or so I heard!

All I can say as a complete non-techy with extremely limited technical ability, is that it makes sense to me to keep our now-elderley engines refreshed with the cleanest, newest oil. Come to think of it, that's a suitable analogy for ourselves - make mine a pint of Harveys.
 

ET43

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Non-VOC Member
Which Oil?

Fellow Vincent owners may want to look at the following site for info on oil.
http://www.cossackownersclub.co.uk/recommended_oil.htm
But, being the thicko that I am, I'm still unsure. If you have a leaker/ user then use a straight 30 in winter and 40 in summer, but if the beast is oil tight then a synthetic might be the way to go. It's all down to cost/ frequency of oil changes I guess. Am I right or wrong?
Cheers, ET43
 

Tom Gaynor

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VOC Member
Which oil

I use Castrol R40 in the Rudge (twice through the Manx then into the Rudge). One is 100 bhp / litre, the other probably 70 bhp / litre. I doubt if the Rudge needs R, but it smells nice, and the bike doesn't leak anyway. And i hate waste......
Vincents, at 45 and 55 bhp / litre are by no stretch of the imagination highly stressed motors, which is their biggest charm (IMHO). My guess is that the best Vin oil is a modern diesel 0-40 like Shell Rimula. I use Rimula 40, which is like syrup in winter (cheap syrup: £28/litre for 20 litres), but whoever said "it probably doesn't matter" was probably closest to the truth. I've even heard of people using cheap motor oil from the DIY store Homebase for their Vincents. Aarghh!! The horror!!!! Homebase bought it from a company called Filtrate who had stopped marketing it under their own name.
Pity really, there were Vin owners throwing themselves under trams when Filtrate went off the market.....
 

Tom Gaynor

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VOC Member
Oil..

Homebase is the DIY side of Sainsbury I think, so the oil might have been Filtrate. That's the sort of thing Ian would have known.

So the general consensus seems to be 'please yourself'!

I've used everything from Sainsbury's multigrade - no longer available I believe, but recommended by the late Ian Hamilton - to whatever has been available from my local Halfords (usually Castrol of some type). I've never used a monograde oil in the Vincent but do change whatever I am using often. I change the filter after every other oil change. This of course is a complete anathema to the modern vehicle owner whose car (in the case of the Cadillac) requires its first oil change at 100,000...or so I heard!

All I can say as a complete non-techy with extremely limited technical ability, is that it makes sense to me to keep our now-elderley engines refreshed with the cleanest, newest oil. Come to think of it, that's a suitable analogy for ourselves - make mine a pint of Harveys.
 

daveinnola

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Non-VOC Member
oh no not more oil talk lol , heres a a fact that i thought the oil companies stopped doing, my son is running a quick change oil place and i was surprised that to find out that the disposal company now buys the used oil from them , when i used to change the oil on some stationary engines i had to pay through the nose to dump it , now they recycle it and sell it as bulk oil to quick oil change shops , who dont advertise the fact its recycled oil , in fact they imply its a brand name by putting oil logo,s all over the shop, this is a common practice across america , so buyer beware :mad:
 

Upstreeter

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Non-VOC Member
Tom, you're quite right...it was Homebase oil when Sainsbury's owned that particular temple to DIY...and Ian did tell me that it was Filtrate.
 

Tnecniv Edipar

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Non-VOC Member
I wouldn't agree that the Vincent Vee Twin is a high performance engine.
The motorcycle has a good performance by virtue of engine size and high & wide torque curve.
The 2 Phils design philosophy was for a durable , high quality , long distance motorcycle that could be largly maintained by it's owner. The charactersitics of the engine don't shout highly strung , low RPM redline , low compression , mild cam timimg etc.
There was even a recommendation that engine revs should be kept below a cetain figure for a continuous rating due to issues with the 'road' bigend assembly.
 

daveinnola

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Non-VOC Member
i always thought that the soft cams and low compression ratio were a given due to the low octane rating after the war, pool petrol they called it i think , and if the black shadow was not hi performance then george brown lapping the island as 86 mph is a remarkable feat given the tires of the day and the frame was not the best in the world and he was riding a low performance rapide :confused:
 
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