It's doesn't take much of a change in viscosity to develop leaks, especially with synthetics.
Joe's "story" reminded me of a very long but extremely sad "butterfly effect" story that happened many years ago.....
In my small city, back in the late 70's, Amzoil was becoming popular, and a friend became an distributor. He gave me a discount if I recommend it to my friends. It worked great in my 77 Kawi LTD 1000, so I said "sure". Yes, I was cheap back then too!
I sold my buddy on trying it on his well beaten 1975-76 Kawi 900. Now he was not known for his "maintenance propensity". Insert 1st clue here.....
He also liked to "partake" in the burning of green leafy substances. Especially before our "Sunday, meet for breakfast, and go tear up the pavement sport ride." And for some reason, this "substance" either made him paranoid, or made him fearful of getting busted. Clue #2.
Well he was more than the usual late, and we waited, ordered, ate, and waited a bit more. (no answer on his phone) We decided, that he probably decided to do something else, so we headed out towards White Sands missile range and Ruiodoso to ride the mountains there. As we headed up the freeway, we passed a couple of motor cops that immediately turned around and chased us down to stop us. Now, this is usually not a good thing, but I was the only wrench at our Kawasaki shop, and worked on their bikes, so I knew them really well. They stopped us to tell us our "buddy" that didn't show up, was in jail. Seems for some reason (see clue #2) he saw a cop car and decided to run. He was finally stopped out of town at the border patrol check point.
So we headed to the jail, and to shorten this part, my buddy told me how to get in his house and get the bail money, and we got him out of the slammer. Her seemed pissed at me, for some reason..... HHHmmmm. As we were young punks, and didn't believe that maybe this was a warning, we started out again for a ride. With my buddy riding bitch with me. We decided to go get something to drink at Sonic, (we are in the desert
) so we headed through downtown. At the time it was set up with the main road splitting around the businesses to make some very fun "esses" around them. We were stopped at a red light a few blocks from downtown, when 5 or 6 guys we had never seen pulled up with us. We all took off "spiritedly" headed for the esses. I then saw something I never though I would ever see, (this could be clue #3) 2 guys on a goldwing, the driver revving the hell out of the motor and dumping the clutch, followed by a huge almost over pivot the top wheelie! RUT RO Rourge, we got squids!
As we headed toward the esses, we dove in at a very fast "clip" (as usual
) with a couple of "squids" on the Kawi 900's wobbling around, trying to stay up. We all get through unscathed, then down the straight toward the end esses where the road comes back together. As I was headed into these esses (two up remember) one of the 900 guys sides into us (clue #4) and we end up jumping the curb! I don't know how we stayed up, but we did! (we even went between 2 cement stops!
)
Now normal people would have said "see you later" and would have gotten as far away from the squidlies as they could, but we were not normal and we all headed to Sonic. As we found out as we were stopped there, these were not squids, but were "wing nuts", airmen from Holloman AFB, 70 miles away. It was getting too late to ride to Ruidoso and back, but not up the mountain to Aguirre Springs by the missile range. The wing-nuts hadn't heard of it, so we all headed out.
This road actually goes up the back side of the Organ mountains, with a couple of miles of straight road before a 20 mph 90 degree turn at the end. And at the end of the straight at that turn, there is a deep gully with huge boulders, Clue #5. We stopped the guys and made it VERY CLEAR, and repeated it many times "ABSOLITELY DO NOT" haul ass past the little squiggle in the road.
As we were putting our helmets back on, the two 900 wing-nuts took off like bats out of hell, racing.
We tried to catch up to slow them down, but they were too far ahead. We got close enough to see one guy literally take off into the gully, no braking what-so-ever! The other guy was in front, saw nothing and headed up the mountain.
It was a nasty scene, without details, the winger was paralyzed from the neck down. His buddy also crashed on the road, but he was just beat up some.
Talk about a hell of a day, and a really long one, getting an ambulance way out there.
You may be wondering what the butterfly effect was? Well, it goes all the way back to my buddy not being too concerned about his bike maintenance. He never checked his oil level, he had no leaking problem with the dino oil, but the Amsoil had found it's way out every small crevice it could, basically leaking like a sieve . And the reason he got caught at the border patrol, was not the station, but that was where his motor seized up with almost no oil! And "that's" why he was mad at me, as I had talked him into trying Amzoil.
So basically, the change to synthetic oil started this whole catastrophe. if he hadn't have gotten caught where he was, at that specific time, we would never have run across the wing-nuts, and the crashes would never have happened.......
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