SWM RS300R Oil And Filter Change

 While almost two years has passed since we bought the SWM RS300R, it doesn’t feel like we have done much riding with it. But with a ride day coming up next week and the “we have had this bike almost two years” in mind, I decided it was time to do an oil and filter change on her.

I took her for a quick spin along some power line easement near home to get her nicely warmed up (and to have some fun) before I dropped the oil. 

Pulling the sump plug saw the hot and very black slippery stuff dump into my catch pan. 

Hmmmm…..that is very dirty looking oil. How many kilometres has this bike actually done? Checking the odometer I was surprised to see exactly 1300km indicated!! We bought the bike with just 560km on the clock and I must say I was surprised to see so many kilometres. Thinking about it though, Will brought the bike down to Forbes last year when Dad passed away. At the time I thought it would be a way for him to stay in a good head space while dealing with such an upsetting situation. I know he rode it a lot at the time but never actually checked the odometer. It does hold a healthy (for a dirt bike) 1.8 litres of oil but if I had checked, I would have done this oil and filter change 12 months ago!

The bike has a couple of mesh filter screens on the left side of the engine. I carefully fished them out taking care not to damage or lose the O rings in the process. 

The screens looked completely clean but I washed them in petrol, hosed them off and dried them in the sun as per the manual.

Next came the cartridge oil filter. It was easily done but I was a bit dismayed at the colour of the filter that I removed!

Yes, these are actually the same size, just a bit of perspective error.

Draining the oil pan I was a bit concerned to see quite a few metal flakes in the bottom.

 Fcuk, not good! 🫤

Many of the shiny bits in the photo below are just the way the light is reflecting off the oil covered clutch/gasket particles but there are quite a few bits of metal in the top centre of the pan. I’d didn’t get a photo of the magnetic sump plug but it also had quite a bit of very fine metal filings stuck to it.

I have moved to Maxima synthetic oil as my go to these days which might be overkill this time around as I will give the bike another oil and filter change in the next five hours or so of operation to try cleaning this crud out of the system.

Clean and clear….. for now. Let see how it looks after Tuesday next week. 🫣

I did tip a little more oil in after this photo was taken to take it to the top mark.

While I was at it she got a precautionary air filter clean too. Not because it was dirty but because it had sat since last October or November and I didn't want to find out the hard way that the filter oil had dried out.

Now she really is ready to go again!

Cheers.