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Vehicle Break-In Period
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NO HIGHWAY DRIVING for the first 500-700 miles. Constant speed on a new engine is no good. City driving is actually good for a car during this time.
Change the oil at the first 1000 miles. However i'm Canadian so Im not really familliar with miles/kilometers ratios. Do it soon! I'd say after the first 3-4 weeks. Factory oil is not to be trusted! It collects all the little residue that is normal in a break-in period and damages the engine over time.
During city driving, drive it normally with periodic reaches into the upper RPM range. Rev it once in a while. Don't ask me why, but thats what you should do.
Thats all i know for sure.
The last one I had I did the same thing with only on that one I drove 450+ miles the first day and didn't change oil till 2500 miles but GM bought it back with only 28000 on it so don't know what it would have done in the long run.I say after 500 miles drive it like you are going to the rest of the time you are going to have it and you will be all right with proper maintance.
new car has a specially formulated engine oil. After that, once every 3 months.
When buying my motorcycle I was more concerned with break in than I am with a car. A few people I know have asked various engine builders what their opinion was and they all basically said the same thing.
Drive vehicle gently with occasional high rpm bursts, no high speeds, no prolonged highway driving. The most important part is getting heat cycles through the engine. get the engine up to operating temp for 20 minutes or so, then let cool and repeat, this gets all the parts to seat into each other.
Other than that, just drive!!
So, there is no special oil for break in? Then, should I really wait till 3725 mile to get the first oil change as specified in the owner's manual?
You also mention no high speeds. Can you be more specific as far as how high is high, and for how long I shouldn't drive my car at high speeds?
I fee resistance once in a while when I hit the gas pedal. Is it common for a new car?
Thanks!
The first oil change on my 2001 Accord will be at 3750 miles. This is per Honda's and the dealer's recommendations for a city/surburban driving cycle. I won't drain it at 1000 miles nor use synthetic. Mobil 1 may prolong the life of the engine, but I certainly won't keep any car long enough to notice...snyths only increase operating costs for most car owners.
I wonder how long some of the paranoid types keep cars...I've never owned a car for more than 38K. If you're expected to take a 50% depreciation hit after 3 years of typical ownership, do you really think I care about how the car is going to work out for the 4th owner with 175K on the odo? If they want cheap, they'll get cheap! I won't intentionally abuse my car but I don't treat it like a thin-shelled egg. Redline is there for a reason...especially with a Honda engine (or any small OHC engine for that matter).
Honda simply says "avoid full-throttle starts". Fine. I won't test out 0-60s before 600 miles, but I'll give the engine gas if I have a tanker on my butt. The whole point is to be conscious of an engine's newness, and ordinary, prudent driving is perfectly sufficient for any modern car during break-in...Babying not necessary.
Basically just drive the car normally and change the oilat 1,000 miles. If you feel something in the accel cable, have it checked out. I work for a company that makes many accel cables!!
http://www.pennzoil-quakerstate.com/indx_pqs/about/products/pr2000-10-31.htm
How long are you planning to keep your Accord, skole? 100K? Maybe less? If so, then don't worry about obsessive break-in procedures. Listen to your Accord manual: for the first 600 miles, avoid full-throttle starts and excessive engine stress. You don't have to drive it like a little granny or keep it under some hypothetical RPM boundary. Drive in a normal fashion, though try as much as possible to avoid hard workloads (climbing mountains, continuous high-speed highway activity, redline starts, etc). If you need to use the highway, use the highway. Don't be afraid to drive over 50 mph or whatever the magic number is today. If you weren't supposed to drive on the highway during break-in, wouldn't the manual say so? Of course it would. Varying your speed is generally good advice, but if you drive in an urban area, that shouldn't be a problem anyhow.
Changing the oil at 1000 miles would be a mistake and too many people around here falsely tell everybody to do this. Their reasoning is to remove all of the little burrs that float in the oil of a virgin engine as it breaks in. Of course, nobody has been able to quantify if these burrs actually cause any premature wear, nor if depriving the engine of its break-in oil doesn't cause harm. The naysayers say break-in oil doesn't exist, but they just don't want to face up to the facts that some manufacturers (including Honda) put friction modifiers in the initial engine fill to control the break-in process. Drain that oil too soon and who knows what could happen. The engineers designed the engine expecting the friction modifiers to be in the engine through the first recommended oil change at 7500 (3750 city) miles. I didn't design my Accord engine, so I'll take Honda's word. Even my dealer said they do not want to see my car for an oil change until 3750 miles, so I have little precedent to give them the finger and change the oil myself at 1000 miles, like some people do. Granted, there MAY be some engines where premature oil changing is advisable, but you won't have to worry about your Accord engine. Follow the manual's service intervals. Note that Honda might, though however unlikely, INVALIDATE your warranty if you change the oil too early because an early change is not their recommendation. Why play with fire?
I also do not recommend snythetic oils for mainstream cars driven in mainstream applications. While snythetics may prove superior over conventionals in the lab, if you don't keep a car long enough or harsh enough to notice, why increase your operating costs when you don't need to?
Never burns oil.
Never smokes....!
Forgot one thing, the manual says that the interval for filter changes is 15,000 miles! You only have to change the oil every 7,500!
I change the filter anyway... Take it to honda, $19.95, they get rid of the oil and do the dirty work. But honda doesn't even know about the 15,000 for the filter unless you remind them!
Sorry so long....
You folks who were posting in the other discussion might like to read back through the earlier posts here - there's lots of good information!
Pat
Host
Sedans and Women's Auto Center Message Boards
BREAK-In is all about "common sense" really. Stay out of the redline for a few weeks and don't use your cruise control, and I can't imagine anything bad could happen to your engine's internals.
Later
Al
I recall a rather famous New York taxicab test where engines were torn down after 150,000 miles...one set of cars had only conventional oil and changes, the other synthetic....the reason for the test was to determine if synthetic oil was economically viable for taxi cab companies.
The results? The torn down engines all looked and wore the same....no difference whatsoever in engine wear.
So this tells me that except for extreme where, as you say "regular oil cannot survive", I'd say synthetic is more or less a waste of money for the average driver.
I actually do use it when driving my cars high speed across the desert, and I used it all the time in my Porsche because winter starts were so much better with it....but also, my Porsche engine ate a valve at 80 mph, so that was a bummer.
By the way, synthetic oil is specifically NOT recommented for rotary engines, interestingly enough.
You know, synthetic oil is like the fuel additives we were jus talking about...the best answer is ----"it really depends".
Al
It's a crutch, really. Residents in brutal International Falls, MN should use synthetic because it flows much better in cold. But Joe Average in Richmond, VA who changes his oil every 3 months will do perfectly OK with conventional 89 cent a quart oil.
Later
But, I have alwasy said, you can use the cheapest oil and filter you can find and if you change it every 3,000 miles you will get a minimum of 100,000 out of that engine. I just no longer like the hassle of bring the car in every 3,000 miles to some idiot ( including dealers) that may leave the plug off or the filter loose etc! I just finished arguing with a service rep about how to change the tranny fluid on a car and he kept showing me the manual and I kept saying, great, but that's not what is under my car. He finally consulted a mechanic who agreed with me. The picture in the maual was WRONG!
In my truck manual, oil change each 5k miles is recommended since i don't live in the desert, tow (yet), or live in mountains. Basically, i don't put a lot of stress on the engine.
All in all, ask the who made the car. They would know...
My friends and I used to love tearing up the rental cars while transporting them to other rental locations. The low-mileage ones with the emergency handbrakes were the best. We'd set the tranny to neutral, rev to redline, and slam it into gear. We'd go about 100 mph on the freeway and pull up the handbrake. Doing donuts in rear-wheel drive cars were also fun. Aaahh, youth.... That was 13 years ago. I'm sure this generation of kids are still doing the same thing.
Moral of the story?
NEVER BUY A USED RENTAL CAR!!
Mr. shiftright
This is from the Mobil 1 website:
"There's not a shred of evidence to suggest that synthetic motor oils delay or prevent piston ring break-in. Maxwell speculates that the rumor got started when synthetics first came to market, and attributes it to the psyche of consumers using the new product for the first time. Remember, back in the mid-'70s conventional oil sold for about 69 cents a can. Synthetics, on the other hand, came in at a hefty 4 bucks a pop. To justify spending so much more, consumers frequently checked the oil level of their new vehicles as if expecting to see some sort of miraculous benefit. What they found instead was a crankcase down a quart of oil, which they attributed to the synthetic. In reality, losing a quart of oil during break-in was standard fare on engines of this era, regardless of the type of oil used. Unfortunately, synthetics got the blame. And they're still trying to live it down."
Additionally, I think it is funny that so many people worry about the engine being babied at break-in. Many cars as soon as they're assembled are run to red-line on dyno-like machines and then driven maniacally into the parking lot. Heaven only knows what happens at those train depots!
I'd be very skeptical of any such claims, and I would really scrutinize the conditions under which such readings were obtained.
But ANYWAY, that's not what the original poster wanted to know. We are getting off topic...sorry, partly my fault on that!
Okay, let's start another topic on this....we are talking about Break In Period.
Synthetics produce less drag on components and also allow the engine to run cooler. Both of these properties are horsepower makers, especially when you consider the tranny and differential.
The way a synthetic saves a bit of fuel is a faster warmup on a cold engine. As for cooling, that's what the coolant does...oil has no way of exchanging heat unless it itself is run through a thermostatically controlled cooler that sits in the airstream.
If your engine is overheating, it will cook regular oil and then proceed to cook synthetic oil. No oil is going to save your engine if there is an adverse condition causing the overheating in the first place.
You'd probably get more benefit pumping up your tires a few pounds and having a wheel alignment done than you would from frictional gains, I think.
A cooler intake charge makes more hp, that's a given. So, a cooler engine may lend itself to a cooler intake, or may not, depends a lot on the model. "Cooler" though is relevant. You have to be warmed up enough to exit open-loop mode of the computer. I swapped out my 195 degree thermostat in my Dodge 5.9L engine for a 180 degree tstat to maintain a cooler engine. If the oil helps as well, then that's an added bonus. You are right though, in that the measured temp diff is probably minimal at best. I think there is probably more impact in the tranny and diff.
I really need to find that artice on the Dakota!
http://www.redlineoil.com/dyno.htm
They gained 4.5hp on the Corvette.
They got a whopping increase in HP of .85 of ONE PERCENT...so 8/10th of 1 percent, and to do this they had to change engine, trans and differential oils.
To get a whopping 1.4 percent increase, they had to use LIGHT oils.
My contention is that .85 of one percent is explainable as a statistical variance, and that using light oils would work the same if you used a very light regular oil.
Like I said, pumping up the tires and getting a wheel alignment is not only cheaper, but would proably get you the equivalent (in road speed and acceleration) of 8 tenths of a percent.
CORVETTE---yeah, maybe taking out the oil cooler is why the C5 has one of the worst possible reliability ratings in the Fall 2001 edition of Consumer Reports.
All this is a LONNGGGG way from convincing me (yet). But keep trying, this is entertaining, and who knows, I might bite on something one of these days.
PS: Did you also see where Redline claimed that raising engine temperature increased HP?
So which is it?
PPS: Uh-uh...you can't compare cold intake charge to cold engine oil...the cold intake charge is denser, and the power increase very explainable by the laws of physics. Cooler oil making more HP is not (to me) explainable (yet).
Your point is valid that a dyno may be off between two runs by this margin, but Redline supposedly made significant runs, and even switched back to the other oil to confirm. Now, the real kicker to all of this is that they were comparing two synthetics against each other, not a dino vs. a synthetic. I believe our original discussion pitted dino against synthetic.
Different engines react differently to increased temperatures, but my experience with my supercharged engines is that the cooler they remain the more power they produce. How much the oil contributes to this I don't know. However if the sump temp is 300+ degrees, the pistons and heads must be heating up, so there might be some loss. It may be a fine line, but as I said, many people shell out a lot of money for a little edge.
If we're changing the subject to racing, that's a whole other ballgame from passenger cars and what they need to run long and well...and how they behave. Racing is an extremely stressful exercise for an engine and every little bit counts.
wtd: Your kinds' days are numbered. Mercedes is seeing to that.