Reply to "Engine Break-In"

quote:

Some oil consumption is of absolutely no concern to me, personally. Niether is it a concern to the engineers that design and develop them. Mostly it is just an inconvenience (having to add oil occasionally). Only car owners seem to be upset by oil consumption.

I think most people's analysis of "why engines burn oil" is based on the (false) idea that an engine shouldn't burn ANY oil and if it does burn some oil then something "must" be wrong and they invent all sorts of logic to explain why it happened. Most all of it is nonsense.

Occasionaly use of full throttle and high RPM is the easy, simple and fun way to eliminate deposits and keep the combustion chambers clean.

Most high output engines will always use some amount of oil as keeping the top rings lubricated at high loads and high RPM is impossible without loosing some oil past the rings. Plus, multivalve engines need to keep all those valve guides/stems lubricated and that is only accomplished with "total loss" oiling.

I doubt seriously that breakin or anything else would have affected the oil consumption. Provide a dose of high RPM WOT accelerations as often as practical to keep the chambers clean and the rings moving and free on the pistons.

Many engines have very aggressive cylinder wall finishes to maintain oil on the cylinder walls to keep the rings lubricated at high specific power levels. This often leads to high oil consumption and variable oil consumption from engine to engine. None of them are "good" or "bad" ..... just some of them use more oil than others.

If the engine is not smoking I would say that the oil consumption (no matter how high it is) is fine and that nothing is wrong. If the engine suddenly starts to smoke and use oil then something obviously changed or failed but low levels of oil consumption are perfectly accecptable.

BMW had such high oil consumption on some of their M engines that they caution to check the oil at EVERY fillup on the autobahn type driving as the engine can run low on oil in a slightly longer interval. They actually replaced engines that failed from oil starvation due to the high rate of oil consumption that was "normal" due to the aggresive cylinder wall finish and low tension ring pack.

The fits and finishes in most production engines these days means "breakin" is pretty much a non issue. I have seen many engines torn down that were broken in in different ways from full throttle operation instantly to gentle driving to no particular breakin at all. They all look fine.

The one thing you usually want to avoid immediately with a new, high performanc engine is revving it to the redline and holding it there. The oil filter will almost always be bypassing to some extent at the oil flow at high RPM and any debris generated during breakin will bypass the filter and end up in the bearings. If the cylinder walls are a cast iron material (either a cast iron block or inserted aluminum block) this means that the cast iron scraped off the cylinder walls during the first few minutes of operation needs to be trapped by the oil filter. Cast iron in the bearings is not good. The high RPM would not hurt the cylinder walls at all but the debris needs to be caught by the filter. That is why all the filter arguements on the internet are so