Re: [St] Insurance and Break In

["Bruce Parker" <bparker15@xxxxxxx>]

Ref: the Motoman accelerated break in:

break in has to do with design, metallurgy, manufacturing tolerances,
filtration, and lubricants.

my dad's old 1950's flatheads would need an engine rebuild after
30,000 miles; their pistons were 'toleranced' to sizes A, B, or C,
depending on how the piston came out of the lathe, and were matched to
cylinders depending on how the block came out of the boring mill.

my '67 Triumph TR6C was built much better, but its cams wore into
flats and looked like big hex nuts in 15,000 miles.

my '83 Econoline went 320,000 miles without a teardown. we routinely
expect 100,000 or two from our cars now, and then they're tired but
not dead - and frequently still have clean emissions. it is truly rare
to see a car with oil smoke behind it nowadays, compared to fifty
years ago; even the Rolls Royces smoked back then.

so the conventional wisdom for that old flathead, where they were
'wearing in' and worried about local interferences seizing, isn't
really applicable to modern engines.

the NASCAR, etc., guys by necessity break in engines very quickly, and
load them at a severe duty cycle for several thousand miles [practice
and race] with very rare catastrophic failures, and they couldn't
afford for performance to degrade much in the race. if conventional
break in gave them a competitive edge, there would be rooms fulls of
motors running thousands of 'miles' at varying loads prepping for
races.

i watched the Harley assembly process at York, PA about twenty years
ago. when the finished bike got to the end of the line, the tester
rode it onto a big dyno-type drum and ran it wide open. your new bike
has been hit hard before you took it home in swaddling clothes.

nowadays, with 6 Sigma and other process improvements, parts just fit.
what was acceptable in the past would be mass recalls today.

the majority of the metallic swarf, polishing grit, etc., that comes
out of a new engine will come out in the first fifteen minutes. we
don't need that paste to circulate as a polishing compound, as was
intended in my dad's old flathead. seat the rings, let the sliding
surfaces of pistons, bearing, gears, and so on, wipe without allowing
heat to build up on a surface - and you're done. the filter gets the
big gritty stuff; get the small gritty stuff out with an early oil
change.

in any case, break your machine in with a plan you like, and then be
happy as the miles roll on.

bp



<That site has been doing the rounds for quite some time now and keeps
popping
up on a regular basis on all sorts of forums.

Everytime I look at it, it seems like it hasnt been updated.

There are as many opinions on this as people that have been breaking
in
engines.

In all the searching I have done, I cant find an indepedant lab test
that can
say what benefits, disadvantages etc there are to any method of
running in an
engine. For now it seems that conventional wisdom, that is the slow
method,
predominately prevails.

Brett.>

_______________________________________________
Triumph Sprint ST/RS mailing list
Send list posts to ST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Change your list options at www.Triumphnet.com