break-in period on 330?

My wife just got a 330. When in doubt, read the manual.

Salesman generall say this, in the same way they'll say that the new car you're buying requires virtually no maintenanc, and that failures of any sort are virtually unheard of. Take everything with a grain of salt.

The OM will probably say that for the first 1K-or-so miles, you should avoid fast starts, hard acceleration, sustained high speeds, and constant speeds for long periods. Good advice. If they give you a hard speed limit, I wouldn't pay much attention to it, other than to not carry a sustained speed above the limt. But a quick run up to 90 for ten seconds here or there shouldn't be a problem.

Just use common sense, don't beat on it immediately, and you should be fine. Make sure you warm up the car by driving slowly until it reaches full operating temp. Avoid letting it idle for long periods and try and avoid heavy traffic; two-lane country roads free of traffic are the best for a new car where the car sees a variety of speeds and loads.

Cars these days require very little break in, but "very little" shouldn't be oversimplified to "none".

- Mark

We just purchased an RX330 and In the owner's manual, it says the following:

Ffor the first 500 miles: don't brake hard, don't run the same speed for a long period of time, etc.

However, it doesn't say anything about going beyond a certain speed.

BTW, we LOVE the vehicle. The AWD is excellent.

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-- Curtis Newton snipped-for-privacy@remove-me.akaMail.com

ICQ: 4899169

Hmmm. Thanks for the info. We're buying the car in Southern California, and then about a week later we're driving it back to our home in Washington (near Seattle). That means we'll be driving about

1200 miles up Interstate 5. About 1000 of those miles will be the first 1000 miles on the car's odometer. How can we avoid "sustained high speeds"? We can't postpone or delay the trip, and there won't be time to put more miles on the car before we leave. We've got a very small time window (and no, we can't buy it in Washington. There are a lot of reasons I won't go into).

So how might we work around this?

Cathy

You're WAY over-worrying this. "Sustained high-speeds" is doing 100+ for an hour or two. Drive normally with the traffic flow, just don't turn on the cruise and leave it at 75 for an entire tankful. I-5 traffic normally runs

70-80, so vary your speed every ten minutes or so in this band and you'll be peachy.

Better yet, get off the superslab and enjoy the wonderful two-lane roads between CA and WA. You've got a wonderful car to take on a wonderful trip - why not take an extra day and enjoy it?

- Mark

It's interesting, but it's the opposite with aircraft piston engines. When they're brand new you start them up, warm them up by taxiing to the runway, and then run them as hard as they'll go for about the first 25 or 50 hours. You avoid going from idle to take-off a lot. The worst thing you can do to a new engine is "baby" it. That will make sure it never breaks in correctly. Of course, their construction and operating environment are very different from auto engines.

In news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, cathy being of bellicose mind posted:

For the first 100-200 miles, simply exit and then re-enter the freeway every ten minutes or so of driving. The coasting to a stop, idle, and acceleration back up to freeway speeds will be good for a new engine.

Thanks for the advice! Sounds like we'll be OK! As for taking an extra day, we've already pushed our return date back as far as we can, we can't afford to take an extra day. It's a pretty complicated situation, with a lot of factors coming into play. But thanks for the tip, I agree, Washington and Oregon has some of the most beautirul scenery in the country. Cathy

Yep, they're different beasts: air-cooled, steel-barrels, much higher clearances, magneto ignition, etc. Their rings and cylinder walls are so hard, glazing is a huge problem, so you want to run them at fairly high power right from the get-go. That's why you run straight-weight, non-detergent oil in them initially - you want a lot of initial wear to get the rings to seat. And you want to get them flying right away - they tend to overheat like crazy during ground operations.

While modern autos are different beasts, excessively "babying" of the engine during break-in can be a problem also. It takes heat and combustion pressure to seat rings properly. The better tolerances of auto engines will generally allow a much great latitude of operating conditions to get good break in, but very high or very low power is equally bad.

- Mark