Parts store had an Altrom brand washer. Supposed to be OEM style.




Surprised how clean drain plug magnet was at only 200 miles on motor. I figured there would be lots of metal on the plug, but almost no metal is what I found. Guess the Lucas break-in additive really works?   

I put a small round magnet inside the spring pushing on the oil filter.   It allways has "particles" on it when I change it.

Congradulations on the NEW bike.   These bikes are the simple-est and funnest things on two wheels.

Forgetting that this is motorcycle engines and not automotive, there will be more metal in the oil because of the wet clutch. But we are still talking smears, not obvious particles.
If anyone finds particles,......please tell me where they are comming from, other than from an engine that is disintigrating.    

Be careful with the tires the first 100 miles or so. There is some kind of slick stuff on them to help them pop out of the mold when being manufactured.

Gyrobob wrote on 04/10/12 at 11:28:12:

If that's your position... why run a filter at all?

Studies have shown that particles of a certain size (no, I don't remember the size, but I'm thinking 15µ) exceed the boundary layer (something like 10µ) of oil imparting damage to engine parts.

Common filter will only take out 20 to 40µ particles.

So given all the crap flowing thru your oil, why would you complain about a one time buy vs. a maintenance buy that will extend the life of at least the filter?  Bysides sucking out all ferris metal particles of all sizes?

I am a magnet proponent, but to answer the question you asked ...

No, there are no studies in a bike engine that say filtering all the minute particles out of the oil make a bike engine last any longer than a bike engine is expected to last.  Such studies would be rebuild to rebuild type studies and nobody does that on bikes.

But really now, how long is a bike expected to last?  10-20,000 miles?  Bikes really generally don't last very long before their owners kill them by neglect.   Savage owners expect their engines to last a lot longer than other small bike owners do and we tend to do some things to make that come to pass.

There ARE studies on the big diesel engines in big trucks, locomotives & ships and such that show that fine particulate removal is very helpful keeping engine oil clean and useable much longer than normal -- and they do track ferrous contaminations, aluminum skirt contaminations, bearing metal contaminations, etc. etc. as their goal on these engines is to go as far as possible between major rebuilds.  

If the oil lasts longer, the engine lasts longer -- that is the expectation these guys run under as they can test and examine the oil fairly easily and frequently to predict the wear levels inside the engine.

BUT, reality says the only plain bearing that we have in the Savage that would demonstratively benefit from better filtration is the aluminum cam bearings in the head.   We kill the cam bearings by oil starvation and low idle speeds, so those bearings never live long enough to get eat up with them little ferrous bits.

We do have piston skirts though, just like the big diesel engines do.  And we do wear them out and get a case of the slaps at 30-40,000 miles.   Could better filtration help here?     Mebbe.

You can save some money on filter changes with a supermagnet on your oil filter as you can run the filter for 2 years.   Big deal -- that's really small potatoes compared to the cost of keeping the bike running with tires and insurance and gas and all.

So, why do it?

Just because we want to -- same reason as all the rest of the mods we do.

Do auto manufacturers use smagnets?


Yep, in transmissions.  Not in engines -- go figure.

Boule’tard wrote on 04/10/12 at 19:41:13:

6k miles? betcha they didn't even find .001" wear.  that'll amount to a couple of feathers.