No offence to that picture, you, or sandblaster... As im not trying to argue, just pointing one thing out....,.. And that is...
That photo proves nothing... It doesnt show were the K5 trannys wear...
You could have been running Laquor thinner, bleach, Canola oil.. etc and that case would still look like that... ..
(Bleach will actually out perform most oils in the Bearing load test)
Got to watch the Car trannys etc that run it... alot of them, the gears are cut differant...
And as a point many have brought up... Woods guys, low miles guys, will never have an issue with ATF...
I have yet to meet a desert racer that runs it... me included...
Think Tom Put it best...
Everyone is entitled to their opinion on running ATF in their gearbox. If someone is happy with the performance of ATF in their gearbox, and they have had good success with reliability, then they should keep using it.
The perspective I take on running ATF is that it has been around long before the KX500 came along, and if the engineers that designed these transmissions would've thought that there was any advantage to running ATF, I would think they would've recommended it. Additionally if running ATF in the KX500 would increase the mean time between failures, I'm sure the factory race teams would've run this in the bikes racing the Baja 1000. A professional racer racing these bikes in the heat for a 1000 miles is tough on parts, and most peoples machine will never endure these conditions. With the racing community I used to be involved with it was common practice for a lot of us to race two to three times a month, some months racking up 300 to 400 off road between practice and racing, and gearbox problems were extremely rare. I didn't know anyone running ATF.