How To Drain Excess Oil From a Motorcycle or Scooter

Track delivery – where is my package? Barbara https://africarx.co.za/ taken for 3 to 7 years Raymond is a writer, domain trader and consultant based in Pennsylvania.
Overfilling your oil isn’t quite as bad as not having oil in the engine at all, but if you know it is overfull you should fix it immediately. A little overfull, not a problem. A lot overfull can be bad for your engine, aerate the oil, and reduce horsepower. Plus you will foul your spark plug and potentially ruin your catalytic converter in your car.

Hopefully it isn’t that overfilled and you just need to take a little bit out.

The best way to drain the excess oil is through the drain plug. That way you will remove any debris that have accumulated at the bottom of your oil pan at the same time. Win / win.

Pro Tip: You don’t need to remove the plug fully to allow some oil to drip out. Drain a bit, check, and adjust accordingly. When you’re sure the oil lever is just right, then do a final tightening on the oil pan drain plug bolt.

However, some of us are in a rush and want to know a trick to getting oil out that doesn’t involve removing the drain plug. Well, I got you covered. Here are my top 4 favorite ways to remove excess oil from a motorcycle or scooter (from least expensive to most):

1. Household Lotion Pump Suction
2. Syringe & Tube Suction
3. The very backyard mechanic style / free– Tipping the scooter / motorcycle.
4. Lastly, buying a manual oil extraction hand pump made for doing oil changes through the oil dipstick tube.

Method 1: Steal the top off your lotion:

• Use a hand pump you’d find on a bottle of shampoo, soap, or lotion.
• Clean it well
• Then insert it into your oil fill port and pump out as much oil as you want.
• This method makes short work of draining excess oil on motorcycles and scooters.
• Replace engine oil cap, and check the oil again.
• Adjust as needed.

Why is this method so great?

Pretty much everyone can find one of these pumps around their house, and it means you don’t have to mess with the drain plug again.

Method 2: The Syringe & Tubing Exacto Method

• Buy a large syringe that also comes with a long piece of tubing.
• I found the perfect one for removing excess oil on Amazon for a great price. Click here to check the price and reviews.
• Photo below is of the type of syringe and tubing setup that works great for this method of excess oil removal.
• Follow the same steps as with the lotion pump method. Remove as much oil as needed, check, and adjust. Simply, put the tubing down the oil fill port on your motorcycle or scooter

Steps to removing excess oil from your motorcycle or scooter with a syringe:

1. Remove oil fill cap
2. Insert tubing into oil fill hole and push it until it reaches the oil.
3. Attach the syringe to the tubing
4. Slowly start applying pressure and pulling the syringe up (drawing out the oil)
5. Draw out as much as you need, you’ll clearly know how much you’re taking out because the syringe will show you. Minus or plus the amount left in the tube (depends whether you let it drain back or not).
6. Remove the syringe, dispose of oil properly, and recheck the amount of oil on a level surface.

Method 3: Just tip it over and be done with it

If your scooter/motorcycle is light enough and you feel you can control it well enough you can tip it over until the oil comes out of the fill hole.

I do this on my Honda elite scooter. Although it is super light and I can easily tip it over far enough to where the oil starts to come out. However, I would not recommend you doing this on anything that you don’t think you can hold onto. This method will not work on all motorcycles or scooters. 

This method is also messier than all the above methods, as the oil will drip down the engine side. In the event of taking too much out you should not reuse the oil since it has been contaminated. With all of the above methods 9 times out of 10 you can reuse the oil safely.

Steps to removing excess oil from your motorcycle or the scooter using the tip over method:

1. Remove oil fill plug
2. Have an idea of how much oil you would like to remove
3. Set up a drain pan underneath the scooter or motorcycle
4. Tip the bike over until the oil starts to flow out the drain hole
5. Lift the bike up and recheck the oil level / adjust accordingly.
6. Dispose of oil / recycle it properly.

Method 4 for fancy pants people that love cool gadgets:

This method is the most costly, but probably the quickest.

You will need an oil extraction pump kit like this one on Amazon.

These oil extraction pumps are built to handle more fluids and to be used specifically for this purpose. You put the tube down the fill hole, and pump out as much oil as you need.

Some people use these types of fluid extractors to do oil changes this way on certain cars and motorcycles. However, I will judge you forever for laziness and bad practice if you do this on your car/truck/motorcycle.

I do not recommend you use this method for regular oil changes only to remove excess oil. This is because it tends to not pick up all the contamination and debris at the bottom of the oil pan, whereas draining the oil the old fashioned way removes more of this debris. 

But if you want to get the majority of the oil out, before draining it the old fashioned way, by all means, buy one of these. Or if your car does not have an oil pan drain plug, you will have to own one of these tools.

Steps to removing excess oil from your motorcycle using the extraction pump method:

1. I found the best value pump on Amazon that will work great for this here.
2. Put the drain tube in the oil fill drain hole (where you add oil to your motorcycle or scooter)
3. Pump the handle on the pump until you get enough oil out that you are satisfied.
4. Check the oil level again and adjust accordingly.
5. Recycle waste oil properly.

In conclusion:

There exist many ways to remove excess oil from your scooter, motorcycle, or even your car. They range in difficulty, and in laziness. Because I error more on the side of being lazy and doing things the non-intelligent way, you will probably catch me tipping my bike over to take out the excess oil.

But really this shouldn’t be a problem, because you just shouldn’t overfill the engine oil. If you know you didn’t overfill the level but the engine oil level suddenly increased– something is broken, and you need to do more diagnosis.

Hopefully, this article helps you get your oil level correct, and remember it isn’t a big deal (we have all done it). The most important thing is to keep checking your oil regularly, change it often, and keep an eye on the level.

Now that your clothes are probably covered in grease wouldn’t you like to know the old school tricks for getting grease out of your clothes?

I spent like 500+ hours researching the best methods for removing engine oil from your clothes. I struggled with this for a long time, and have ruined so many pairs of nice clothes.

Ok, I didn’t really spend 500 hours, but I still found out some cool information. Read what I found here.