make sure when you first start it, you let it idle for about 2 fan cycles and constantly change the oil and filter. With-in the first 200 miles you should have done about 2 oil changes already. One pretty much after 30 minutes of the engine running.

 

This is probably old news, but there's some info here that makes sense to me: http://www.mototuneusa.com/circular_logic.htm

The gist is, drive it like it's a rental car from a car rental company that screwed you over.

 

That site is awesome, too bad the format is terrible. I read through the whole article on bearings, and it was very informative!!

Chris

 

I couldn't find it. where is the article?!?

 

That is how I broke in my new torbo engine... so far it has been working fine .... its pulling around 23 pounds of vacum......

 

you mean Hg/mm or hg/in

 

23 pounds of boost? or 23 inches of mercury?

 

I've said this in his previous article and I'll say it again here.

YOU SHOULD NOT RELY ON ANY 'FACTS' PRESENTED HERE!

I've done this to his prior article and I'll do it here if I have to. The problem is that he presents a lot of pseudo science arguments but nothing he has presented is scientific in any way. His experiments he lists are not scientific. The techniques he uses to make his arguments are well established. They have been used by con-artists for centuries. It's frustrating for me to read something like this for two reasons. Number one it claims to be scientific but I can say with certainly that the methods he uses are not real science. The second reason is that I believe that there is some potential merit in the claims that a hard break in creates a marginal increase in power(I don't believe the reliability claims)

However while you main gain power, there are risks and he glosses over these risks. I think that honda has the data that says there is a statistically significant risk that a hard break-in will lead to a premature engine failure under a warranty period. Does this mean that premature engine failure is likely with a hard break-in, no. It just means that from the point of honda warranty, a hard break-in would cause enough failures to increase warranty costs. This is something that honda wouldn't want to do. The likelihood is that a hard break-in is not going to hurt you, but I doubt you will see significant gains from doing so.

I honestly don't know what to say to you. If your builder says to break-in gently then he would be the expert I would trust rather than anyone on the internet. Afterall this is the person who you trusted to build your engine properly. If he's going to give you bad advice, should you have trusted him to rebuild your engine in the first place?

 

I'm the builder. Its not rocket science to bolt my head on to a brand new short block.

 

But break-in's always do take place mostly in the first hour of the engine actually running. When the end user gets them from honda, it's pretty much already has had most of the filing work done to it already. Everyone knows that the 10 miles you get the car from were driven with the engine under a lot of load and "abuse". Plus no one really knows what they do to the engines right after it's assembled at the honda plant.

Every real engine builder I've asked with at least 15 years of race engine building experience all recommend a hard break-in but that doesn't really mean high RPM. Some of them say lots of load and upto 2/3 of max RPM's the engine will see.

A hard break-in increasing warrenty coverage costs could relate to people who've never driven the car into mis-shifting, grinding gears, hitting the rev limiter too often, etc.