Two-Stroke Engine Maintenance, the Dummy Version

two-stroke engine diagram

The research team member who uncovered today's example of utter bull asked around and, perhaps oddly enough, no one on the staff at the Antisocial Network owns a motorcycle. Heck, none of them were even aware that such a thing as a two-stroke motorcycle existed, though most are well aware of what a two-stroke gasoline engine is and how it differs from a four-stroke. That, however, does not apply to eHow's Mark O'Brien, as he made quite clear in the post "How to Change Oil on a 2 Stroke Motorcycle"¹ (the missing hyphen is eHow's, not ours). Oh, and the post was moved to ItStillRuns.com, but ItStillSucks.

O'Brien's ignorance of the topic is right up front in his introduction:

"With a two-stroke engine, you add the oil in one compartment and the gasoline in another and the engine siphons the correct amount of each into the engine while it is running."

Unfortunately, that's only true of a few two-stroke motorcycles and scooters. The key to notice here is that the OQ asked how to change the oil. With an auto-lubricating system such as O'Brien describes, there's no need to change oil because it's consumed as the engine runs. Besides, most two-stroke motorcycles don't have auto-lubrication, they use the same pre-mixed fuel system as ordinary lawn equipment. Note: O'Brien claims to "fix mowers part-time." We'll be darned if we'd take our lawn equipment to someone who'd say that about a two-stroke engine!

No, regardless of what Mark says, the OQ wasn't asking about the oil that lubricates the engine, he was asking about the oil that lubricates the transmission: that, you change! and every reference we found online suggested that the transmission oil be changed at intervals measured in hours as opposed to O'Brien's advice of "...change your two-stroke oil every season"! Mark follows this mishmash of misinformation up with canned instructions about how to drain and refill the oil, including this tasty instruction:

"Put the funnel in the oil check dipstick hole. Fill the oil compartment with oil until it is up to the correct 'Full' level on the dipstick."

This comes after he advises the reader to check the owner's manual for the correct type of engine oil -- why not get the bike's oil capacity at the same time? and pouring oil down a "dipstick hole"? Yikes!

No, this is just one more example of the sort of misinformation eHow's stable of misinformers, many with liberal arts degrees like O'Brien's AA in English, vomited out in content farms before Google killed the places dead with the Panda update. It's still out there, though, and that's where we find most of our Dumbass of the Day recipients.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5896915_change-oil-stroke-motorcycle.html

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