The best part of the video is just digging around in dad’s shop and meeting dad!

Just shake the bottle before use.  Lol.

I was buying motorcycle oil at Advance Auto Parts a few years ago.  They had some motorcycle-specific Valvoline on the shelf on clearance.  It was $0.09/quart.  Of course, at that price, I bought it (remember, I’m cheap).  It went in a pit bike that only took like 750ml of oil. It worked.  Clutch didn’t seem to care or act too picky.  It was better that the black tar I drained out of the motor is probably what the bike was thinking.  

Back in the early 80s when I was in college, I had a part time job as a Lab Technician at Pacer Lubricants.  I got to play with oils, chemicals, and lab equipment with minimal training (scary).  I dropped a 2 gallon glass container of toluene on the floor.  We had to turn on the emergency ventilation system and evacuate the lab for a few hours.  Needless to say, the Owner and my boss weren’t too happy with me.  Not my fault they stored the toluene on a 7’ high shelf and didn’t have a small stool or ladder available!

One of the cool oils we blended was Royal Purple (based just up the road in Porter TX).  Remember Royal Purple - it was “the sh!t” back in the day!  That stuff got a bunch of crazy additives in it that nothing else we blended ever got in the concoction.

Most of my job was taking samples from the freshly blended 55 gallon drums and filling up test tubes and sticking it in a machine for analysis (to be evaluated by my mad scientist petroleum Engineer boss).  Then we’d send the drum back into the shop and tell the guys out there what they needed to tweak to get it perfect (according to the recipe).  

The most fun test was the “flash test”.  Put some oil in basically a small frying pan and then heat it until it caught fire.  Royal Purple always won that test by a mile.  I can’t remember the exact numbers, but I remember thinking as I watched …. Is this stuff ever gunna catch fire!?

The biggest revelation at the time was that no matter what brand of oil we were blending, everything started with the exact same Mobil base oils (conventional dyno juice anyway).  And they all used virtually the same additives just in varying amounts.  A little more/less of this or that and a maybe a shot of a little something special in their secret sauce.  Royal Purple was definitely a concoction all its own at the time.

Royal Purple Lubricant Advisor (I should get paid for promoting this…lol).  I’ve never used Royal Purple Max Cycle in a bike, but Royal Purple Racing Oil seemed to work well in my ‘74 Tran’s Am until it threw a rod doing about 140mph.  Glory Days!  Lol.

https://royalpurple.lubricantadvisor.com/en/recommendation/152856

Yup!  A big glass container 7’ up on a shelf.  No kaboom when it hit the floor except for the glass breaking into a million pieces!  The bunsen burner was turned off at the time.  I at least followed that safety procedure when handling toluene!   But, I probably was rockin’ AC/DC TNT at the time it happened though.

It is crazy what happened with clearances and motor oil weight.  I remember when the thickest Castrol oil you could find was the best thing you could do for the motor.  Mom’s ‘78 Toyota Celica GT certainly liked it!  That was a fun car to drive back in the day!

zipidachimp wrote on 08/18/24 at 13:08:22:


I think that's how I end up at SuzukiSavage.com too often.