For christmas, I got a valve job and new rings on my type R after a burnt valve and losing lot of oil. Acura chipped in some of the cost because the car was dealer serviced all the time. Anyway please help me with the folllowing:

1. How to drive the new motor for the first 500 - 1000 miles
2. Any tests such as Compression and leak down tests to do and what to expect from the results to make sure the job is done right. I have a 12k 1year warranty.

3. Tips on break in for a rebuilt motor ?

Please help me, I am worried and do not have the knowlege required.

thank you,

 

I would take it easy for the first 500 miles, don't stay at one speed for extended amount of time and keep a close eye on the oil and it's condition.

as for testing it, sure do a compression test and leakdown- it can't hurt.

 

Btw, how many miles did you have when you needed the rebuilding of the head?

 

if you are getting new rings, might as well put in some new pistons...maybe consider jdm itr?

 

87k miles. The mechanic said do not do > 55 miles per hour for the first 500 miles. He asked me to wait for the compression and leak down test to give time for every thing to settle in. The numbers could be here and there if we do it now.

Before the repair my car used to throw huge puffs of black smoke when ever I floored and took off under vtec. I had black soot all over my rear bumper and under the wind. It also used oil of 1.5 quarts for every 1000 miles.

I have to wait and see if that goes away now.

thanks

 

Black smoke only means you were burning rich, if you had it tuned it would have been less. as for the oil consumsion had you changed the pcv often?

1 qt of oil seems to be the norm for many ITRs, mine is worse then that tho and she still runs fine

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Bbasso &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Black smoke only means you were burning rich, if you had it tuned it would have been less. </TD></TR></TABLE>

Have you seen your bumper?

If it was a stock engine.... wont be running rich enough to dirty the bumper.

 

if you breaking in a new engine do it this way (i've done it a few times and it yelds great results)
https://honda-tech.com/zerothread?id=748015

 

Are you sure about the theory ? You are not kidding right ?

 

What's to kid? Some people do it, and some people don't. Its all about what you think is going to work best...that's all that really matters anyway right?

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by .RJ &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Have you seen your bumper?

If it was a stock engine.... wont be running rich enough to dirty the bumper.</TD></TR></TABLE>

Not true, I've covered my bumper with soot with stock motor, only mod being Tanabe Racing Medallion exhaust.

I think bumper-dirtiness has a lot to do with the exhaust configuration. I ran my car rich as hell (turbo, rich off-scale, misfiring), and with the silencer in my Tanabe racing medallion the rear bumper was clean. I think the small diameter created enough velocity to get the exhaust away from my car before it started swirling.

With the silencer out, stock and turbo, my rear bumper gets dirty.

There's a lot of break-in procedures out there, here's one:
http://www.mototuneusa.com/break_in_secrets.htm
<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">
What's The Best Way To Break-In A New Engine ??
The Short Answer: Run it Hard !
</TD></TR></TABLE>

[e] onePOINTsix posted a link with the same break-in procedure as MotoMan link above.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by .RJ &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Have you seen your bumper?

If it was a stock engine.... wont be running rich enough to dirty the bumper.</TD></TR></TABLE>

When you typed that were you being serious?

Cause my car has been stock for a very long time and the rear bumper and the underside of the wing gets covered in black sut.

And then when I had the header & test-pipe with semi-stock back it did not make a difference is the sut, it only shoot it out far enough to cover Opie's clean *** CW

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Bbasso &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">

When you typed that were you being serious?

Cause my car has been stock for a very long time and the rear bumper and the underside of the wing gets covered in black sut.</TD></TR></TABLE>

And your car burns a shitload of oil. 2+2 = 4.

 

there's another way to break in a engine that I found on the internet. I would try this approach myself, it's a bit more technical but I like it better. Found it on Overboost tech articles.


Americans aren't usually considered patient people. The TCP/IP protocol—the very foundation of Internet communication as we know it—was invented by Uncle Sam to ensure the military would have access to reliable, decentralized data communication in war zones. Civilian use of the Internet started becoming common at universities in the late 1980s; at the turn of the 21st century, Internet access is viewed by Americans as important as running water and more important than home telephone service. Millions of dollars are transferred over the 'net daily; orders for food, medication, heck, even DMV appointments. Generations of Americans can now be lumped together into one: The instant-gratification generation. Our international peers view us as "eager for progress." (Read: impatient.) In Japan, vehicle owner manuals list, in detail, a long procedure for breaking in the engine in a new car. These same vehicles sold in the U.S. simply state something to the effect of "drive it easy for 500 miles. Change oil at 5,000 miles."

The polished surface on this cam is from a good break-in.
Why is Break-In Necessary?

Most people do it only because they're told to, without knowing the mechanics of what goes on inside a new engine, so we'll start you with an analogy. Imagine someone telling you to cut a piece of plywood into a perfect circle. Then they give you a larger piece of plywood and tell you to cut a hole in it so you could perfectly insert that circle. You'd be hugely lucky if it fit. And if it did, the fit would be pretty rough. No matter how precise you do the work, you'd have to account for thickness of the blade, little fibers of the wood that stick out and interfere, curvature of the wood upsetting your perfect lines and so on and so forth. There'd be an unavoidable bit of error in all your work.

Manufacturing items out of metal presents many of these problems. Making precision parts from metal usually involves grinding, cutting, forging or casting. These processes absorb or release heat, and temperature changes cause metal to expand and contract. The machines used to make the machines also wear, adding further dimensional changes to the product.

This affects the final product because each piece will have expanded and contracted slightly differently than other pieces in a manufacturing run, and when you assemble 100 small pieces, each with a different size than the next, the error compounds and the final product is quite a bit different than what's expected. Engineers can account for most of the error, and the nice word for it is "tolerance."

Let's say you design a piston that's 100-millimeters in diameter. After doing a small production run the pistons roll off the mill anywhere from 99.50-millimeters to 100.50-millimeters in diameter. You have a tolerance of 1.00-millimeter, or 100 mm +/- 0.50 mm. Living with error is just a fact of life.

As we said earlier, each component has its own design tolerance, and all those half-millimeter errors could potentially pile up into something big. (Which they usually do.) Let's also remember that running an engine causes it to wear—wear is a type of machine work in its own rite, and wear will be the final "machine work" step an engine will see. Since engine parts are solidly affixed together, the type of wear they experience helps to mate things together; a dating-leading-to-marriage type deal.

What Are The Mechanics Behind Break-In?

All right, now you know why there is such thing as break-in. Now the question becomes: What specifically in a new engine needs to be broken in? The short answer is "everything." Many engine parts do not require a critical break-in process, but most of the major parts do: Camshaft, lifters, engine block, pistons and rings. The crankshaft and connecting rods don't really wear per se, but they do contain internal stresses as they roll off the assembly line. Heat cycling relieves the stresses over a short period of time, but also changes their shape, in turn affecting how a piston bears against its cylinder wall, how high it reaches at TDC, etc. Anyway, that's practically bordering on a nano approach to engine break-in, so we'll stick to the major points.

# Camshaft lobes wear parallel to lifter pads.

# Camshaft bearing bores wear to fit camshaft journals.

# Piston rings seat to bore shape.

# Piston skirts fit to bore shape.

# Heat cycling settles bearing caps, head-to-block fit, etc.

# Connecting rods stretch at RPM, putting piston higher up into unworn sections of the bore.


In actuality, it takes very few miles for a piston ring to seat.

Let's go over the term "ring seating." Many people are under the mistaken impression that piston rings take a long time to seat; in actuality, it takes very few miles for a normal piston ring to seat. Having said that, what is ring seating? Each cylinder is honed to round, but of course there is a tolerance, so the cylinder won't be completely dead-accurate round. The piston ring meant for the bore won't be a perfect circle either, so what you have are two out-of-round circles. Imagine a cylinder bore in an oval shape. The piston ring is an oval shape too, but it's installed with the points of the oblong perpendicular to the cylinder. Start the engine and the ring will pop into place. With round rings, running an engine will cause the rings to rotate slightly about their axes, and eventually they'll "snap" into position in the bore. That's how rings seat.

All right, we've covered a lot of ground here in the Overboost Fire Hose Classroom style. Now let's go over the actual how-to break in a new engine.

# 0-200 miles: Keep under 3,000 RPM. No lugging the engine (let it rev free). Give it about 10 first-gear shots to 4,000 RPM.


# 200-400 miles: Raise rev ceiling to 4,000 RPM with 10 first and second-gear shots to 4,500 RPM.


# 400-600 miles: Rev ceiling to 4,500 RPM with 10 shots to 5,000 RPM through third gear.


# 600-800 miles: Rev ceiling to 5,500 RPM with 10 shots to 6,000 RPM.


# 800-1000 miles: Rev ceiling to 6,000 RPM with 10 shots to 6,500 RPM.

Change the oil and filter at 1,000 miles. If your engine uses mechanical valve lifters (most Hondas), check the valve lash too, since valve lash will change the most during engine break-in. Usually the lash gets smaller because the valve will settle a bit deeper into its seat. Too little valve lash can kill fuel economy and power because it will reduce manifold vacuum. Other than that you're ready to rip.

A few key points. Keep your driving style random. No keeping the engine sitting at a certain speed on the freeway and no doing your 10 higher-RPM shots right in a row. You want to accelerate briskly in lower gears with plenty of RPM variation and lots of decelerating while in gear. Also, don't use synthetic oil for break-in purposes. Use the crappiest SAE-approved engine oil you can as long as it's the proper weight. When you see new cars that come with a factory fill of synthetic oil, the break-in procedure has been handled at the factory.

Now, why the strict RPM control? Since the parts aren't mated in a new engine, as they would be on a used engine, some parts will be running tighter than they should, and over-revving them can overheat them from friction. Excessive heat will weaken parts and break down engine oil more quickly. We should caution you about breaking in the engine at too low an RPM as well; higher RPM means more volume from the oil pump and allows the connecting rods to stretch, which in turn allows the pistons to explore their upper reach into the combustion chamber.

Brand New Engines

When you buy a new car, "dry" starting of the engine and oil system priming has been taken care of for you. If you're in a situation where you've rebuilt an engine and it is completely green, you can follow the above break-in procedure but only after prefacing it with a few other items. First of all, you'll want the oil system primed before firing the engine. When we build engines here this is how we do it. The pistons, rings and cylinder walls are sprayed liberally with WD-40 with the piston pins lubed with 20W-50 engine oil. Assembly lube everywhere else, but absolutely no assembly lube in the cylinder bores. Assemble and install the engine without sparkplugs, crank engine on the starter until oil pressure builds, then install plugs and fire. Camshafts will require their own break-in procedure; this is simply done by immediately revving the engine to 2,500 RPM and holding it there for 20 minutes. Once that's done, start driving.

Engines That Have Been Sitting

Similar to starting a dry engine for the first time. Remove sparkplugs, spray liberal amount of WD-40 into the combustion chamber, crank engine to build oil pressure, install plugs and go. And of course, clean out the sparkplug bores if dirt threatens to fall into the engine when you pull the plugs.

What About Race Engines? I Never See Them Being Broken In!

Race engines don't have to last 100,000 miles on the street either! One primary trick to getting race engines broken-in very quickly is to make every mating surface rough. The roughness increases the initial abrasion that causes break-in. Of course, the engine wears more, but in a race situation the idea is fast break-in with engine life taking a back seat to just about everything else.

One last thing... even though we say rip the RPM to like 6k we know you're not going to exceed the speed limit. Have fun and be safe.