Search This Blog

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Two wheeler (aka bike) : initial care

I bought Royal Enfield Thunderbird last Thursday. This bike is amazing!

I am doing some research on initial care of bike. You can use this information on your own risk, I do not have anything much to support my conclusions than commonsense and my BE (Mechanical) qualification.

Why do you need to take special care in initial months?
The same reason why baby needs special care in initial months :)
Engine which is heart of your bike is created using casting procedure and it is machined afterwards on CNC machines. It is highly possible that the surface finish of many parts inside the engine is not very smooth initially. When you start using engine, these parts get rubbed against each other. It is possible at this stage - if you have some small burs (small metal chips) remaining in the crankcase then these parts will get scratches. These initial scratches can result in big loss of efficiency and total engine life.

What are the general precautions one should take in initial months?
1. Give you bike some time to warm up!
Do not expect your bike ready for riding as soon as you start it. Think of it like someone has awakened you from sleep and now is forcing you for some heavy work.
When engine starts it takes some time for oil film layer to get developed between different friction-generating parts. If you give some time to your bike's engine to run on idling - this oil film will be developed before you actually go for ride.
2. Do not exceed speed (rpm) limits
Again as you know baby learns walking step by step and then after some time baby is able to run.
Similarly your vehicle first needs to be run on lower speeds, after each servicing max speed limit will be little higher. If you are lucky enough to have rpm meter then better keep eye on engine rpm than speed.
Reasons for initial speed limits are - same as the reasons explained in 'Why do you need to take special care in initial months?'
3. Try to ride on less crowded roads in initial days
Reason is simple - your engine will be running on almost constant rpm and also transmission system wont face much shocks.
4. Do not compromise on fuel and engine oil quality!
Using bad quality fuel/engine oil for bike is like eating bad quality food.
Remember - fuel is something which burns inside the engine cylinder, if it is of bad quality it is surely going to have bad effect on engine.
Engine oil does cleaning work inside engine and it is also responsible for maintaining temperature of engine unit. Engine oil is also responsible for reducing friction between the rubbing parts inside the engine.
5. If you get any vibration - noize or any other problem - get it repaired immediately.
Do not wait for servicing time to get these problems repaired. Ignoring these problem will result in making them bigger and making long life impact on your vehicle.
6. Avoid over-heating
Some people might think it is great to go for long rides in first few km. I think it is really good to go for long  rides in initial running, long runs do provide good conditions for engine and transmission system.
On highways engine rpm (speed) is almost constant and also gears are rarely shifted.
But do not forget that you should take enough breaks for engine to cool down. Over-heating might cause some problems (my gut feeling).

I will keep updating this post. If there are any mistakes in this post - please post comment. Your comments and suggestions are very much welcome.

Thanks to Harshad Sharma who helped me to think on these points.

2 comments:

  1. Amazing write up dude..One of the best blog entries I've ever come across..Cheers mate..

    ReplyDelete