I have been thinking about a vacuum oil extractor for my motorcycles recently. I had never even heard of them until about a week ago. I was helping a buddy of mine down at the marina winterize his boat. It is a 25' inboard and he was using a device to suck out the oil through the dipstick tube. Apparently, this is very common in the marine community since many inboard boat engines have no or very difficult access to the bottom oil drain plug. What piqued my attention is that he uses the same unit at home for his cars and motorbikes. He absolutely loves it for oil changes. He said that it does not work on some cars because the vacuum hose may not make it to the oil sump pan but it works on all of his cars and bikes.
I do not have a motorcycle lift at home and as I approach 50, my enthusiasm for crawling on the ground pulling drain plugs is dropping. It is particularly a pain in the rear to drain the oil from my Aprilia maxi-scoot. So the other day I was at Lowe's and found a Liquivac small engine oil extractor on sale for $ 29 as opposed to the normal price of $ 34. I bought one. It holds three quarts, and my largest bike holds 2.4 liters of oil, so this should work for the bikes.
I did some Googling, and the key to success is to warm up the engine for 2-3 minutes to thin the oil, and to move the vacuum hose around a bit to suck out all the oil. Typically, this method removes as much or more oil than pulling the drain plug. On my Aprilia, you have to tilt the scooter to the left to get all the oil out. This always gives me the heebie-jeebies, since the scooter weighs 504 pounds, and if it tilts too far, I cannot stop it from dropping. With all the expensive Italian plastic, dropping it is a very expensive proposition.
So does anyone else use an oil extractor, and how has that worked for you? Any tips for me?
