In my last entry, I described the install of the Hawke Oiler. Next up is the Pro-Oiler.

The Pro-Oiler is made by a company in Belgium. But they delivered it to me in the USA without any trouble. The packaging was very good, with things in individual bubble wrap bags. There was a stack of instructions, about 50 sheets of paper. I was relieved to note they were stapled into three bundles, because I figured this would mean that two of them must be other languages and I could throw them out. Alas, my hopes were dashed - all three were in English. One section was the installation and operating manual, one was troubleshooting, and the third was the FAQ. And now that I've been through it, I can say that this is definitely not a project to attempt without reading the instructions carefully first.

The Pro-Oiler components are first rate! The picture at the top is the contents of the kit.

Interesting that the reservoir appears to be the exact same Nalgene type bottle that came with the Hawke Oiler. However, instead of coming out the cap, the oil feed line comes out of the shoulder of the bottle, which will make it possible to remove the cap without moving the bottle, nice. Like the Hawke Oiler, the feed line has a tube inside the bottle, that reaches to the bottom. The vent is a second tube sticking out right next to the feed line, rather than a simple hole in the bottle, so I suspect it is a bit less likely to leak.

The tubing is much stiffer, and much thinner, than the aquarium style tubing used in the Hawke Oiler. The pump is smaller, and has an arrow on it indicating the direction the oil flows.

The controller has a shielded cable coming out of it, that has six very small wires in it, black/blue/green/red/white/yellow. The yellow wire is never used in any configuration - I am guessing this shielded cable simply comes with six strands and they only need five of them.

The junction box is a little project box with a small circuit board in it. It doesn't have any holes pre-drilled for wires - the instructions say that this is so you can drill your own holes in the best location for your install.

There are three Posi-Tap connectors, a couple pieces of Dual-Lock, and a number of zip ties in several sizes.

The applicator has dual nozzles and a bracket that attaches to one of the screws that holds the chain guard, and points it perfectly with one nozzle on each side of the sprocket. (The kit is bike specific.) No need to wrap zip ties around the swingarm, and no need to heat and bend tubing to get it to the correct angle. Here's a closeup picture of the applicator:

And here is a picture of the applicator, installed on the bike:

I routed the tubing along the brake line, and zip tied it in place, to get it up to the underseat area. I decided it wasn't necessary to drill a hole, since the tubing is so thin and stiff, and the VFR had plenty of access to route the tubing up under the bodywork.

The most difficult part was finding a spot to stow the reservoir bottle. The underseat compartment in the VFR just isn't very deep, and it was hard to find a spot where I could orient the bottle properly, and still have reasonable access to it. In the end, I decided to velcro it to the outside of the seat rail, inside the bodywork, on the right hand side. I decided to use standard velcro instead of dual-lock, because dual-lock is really only sticky a half dozen times before those little bristles start to wear out, and because it's a huge pain to pull it apart when it isn't worn out. I cut a strip of velcro about eight inches long, and applied one side to the seat rail, where it runs for a couple of inches on either side of the spot where the bottle attaches. The other side, I wrapped all the way around the bottle. This should keep the ends from peeling up as I take the bottle in and out. The weight of the bottle rests on the bodywork. I think this should hold it well enough, but I will definitely keep an eye on it! Also, I've failed to follow one part of the instructions - they want me to have a 30cm vent tube. I don't know where I would put that much tubing, so I shortened it. Another thing to keep an eye on, I guess. I have more tubing in case I do need to lengthen it, though finding a spot for it to stick up and out would remain difficult.

The pump needs to be within 40 cm of the bottle, and not more than 10 or 15cm above or below. I could have put it very close to the bottle, but the tubing is too stiff to bend that much. I tried heating this tubing with my butane torch and bending it to a more convenient shape, and had limited success. So I put the pump about 30 cm away, near the center of the underseat compartment. I put the junction box next to it, so I wouldn't have to splice longer leads onto the pump.

The Pro-Oiler needs a tap into the speedometer sensor wire, to determine how fast/far the bike is going, so it can meter the oil accordingly. On the 4th Gen VFR,the speedometer sensor wire is pink, and runs from a sensor on the countershaft compartment, to a three terminal plug that is one of several that are held by a bracket on the outside of the seat rail, under the bodywork, on the left side. This seemed the most convenient place to tap into it with one of the Posi-Tap connectors, and attach the blue (not yellow) piece of wire from the kit.

Four wires from the controller cable, are connected to terminals in the junction box. For a bike with an electronic speedo sensor, they are black/blue/red/green. If you have a reed switch, you use the white wire, and nothing uses the yellow wire, whose very existence is confusing since the instructions keep referring to a yellow wire, when the wire they provided to connect to the speedometer sensor was blue! The yellow wire in the cable was already cut off short, and I cut the white one short as well, so I wouldn't have to deal with either of them - there isn't a lot of room in the box! The four wires from the cable, and the blue-that-should-be-yellow wire from the speedometer sensor go into five of the terminals on one side of the board. The two black wires from the pump (which are interchangeable), the red power lead and the black ground lead, go into four terminals on the other side of the board. There's a nice clear diagram in the instructions showing what wire goes to what terminal.

Here's a picture of the underseat compartment with these various components installed, the lid off the junction box so the circuit board inside can be seen, and the tubing routed:

The controller box, I first placed on the fairing, where I could easily reach it with my left hand. But when I did the EMI check, it failed miserably - the pulse counter was seeing about a dozen pulses a second. I spent several days trying to figure this out. There's a troubleshooting flowchart for this, that includes a lot of discussion of how/where to connect the ground ("earth") wire, none of which helped. I eventually determined that there is a bad EMI spot on my bike, on either side of the fairing, just in front of my knee, and when the cable goes through that spot, it finds EMI there. Probably the coils. There was no way to route the cable in such a way that it would stay out of the bad EMI spot, yet still allow me to place the controller box right side up in that spot on the fairing. In the end, I placed the controller box on the instrument panel, and routed the cable along the center fairing stay, over the top of the airbox and under the gas tank. I'm not sure I like having the controller there, but I guess I'll see how it goes. If it turns out that it drives me crazy, I'll find someplace else, somehow. I could mount it back on the tail, under the Givi rack. Or maybe sideways or upside down in my original spot.

(Edited 5/20 to add: I have since discussed this with a friend who is an electrical engineer. He thinks that the EMI problems would be reduced by adding a ground wire that connects the cable's metal sheath to the frame. I haven't tried this yet. I didn't see anything like that in the instructions, but maybe I missed it - there are an awful lot of instructions!)

(Edited 9/25 to add: Turns out the cable did not have a metal sheath, it was just heavy plastic, so there was nothing to ground. In midsummer I relocated the controller box to a spot on the tail of the bike, protected by the support bracket for the Givi rack. This completely stopped the EMI problem, and I actually like it better, since it's more unobtrusive. But it does mean that I can only adjust it when I am stopped.)

The instructions describe setting a correction factor, that tells the Pro-Oiler how many speedometer pulses per wheel revolution. You spin the wheel ten times, and the system counts how many pulses that is. You divide by ten, and that's the correction factor. I discovered that the VFR doesn't produce any pulses unless the engine is running - simply turning the key so the Pro-Oiler has power, is not enough. And if you don't have a correction factor set, the Pro-Oiler gives an error code of "CF-Err". Turning on the engine and leaving the bike in neutral allowed me to turn the wheel and count pulses properly.

The Pro-Oiler's pump came with some red liquid (ATF?) already inside it, plus the controller has a prime function. This made it much easier to prime.

This is a far more complicated installation than the Hawke Oiler, in spite of all the slick purpose built parts. Just installing all the parts and getting them working was a tough job, and programming it is complicated. There are charts and diagrams enough to please the geekiest engineer. It was a little overwhelming, actually, but I got through it. And I am very impressed with the quality of the components, and the hard work that obviously went into the design. I have high hopes for this oiler.

Here's another Pro-Oiler install description from Rad, that I found helpful when I was doing this.