I forgot, I did the same thing on my NSR and two years later, it’s still running like a beauty for the guy who bought it from me.
bobepine
My Cyguns!!! I just rememberd that I broke her in nice and easy…and then roughly 6 months later I kept asking my mechanic why it was slower than all my friends stock Cygnuses…and they just rode theirs normally right off the bat.
<edit: I just found this from another regular bike rider:
I did a by the book break-in for my 250, and I couldn’t be more displeased with the result. Only a few thousand miles, and it gets a pretty good amount of oil blowback into the air cleaner if I run it over 8k RPMs for any chunk of time. In Houston, that is of course all the time. A bit of blowback is apparently normal in many 250s, but mine is the worst case I’ve heard of. I of course can’t prove that the break-in did this, but it certainly didn’t help. It doesn’t actually hurt the bike at all, but it’s an annoying bit of routine maintenance to have to do. Drain the airbox once a week, line the floor under the bike so I don’t stain the floor w/ minute amounts of dripping oil, and add oil every few weeks. Not fun.
Summary: no more soft break-ins for me! >
hmmm… break in is something debated about…
personally… i tend to keep the revs under the recommended amounts usually but will still let it slip above occasionally… never had a problem so far…
personally, i use the break in time to learn how the bike handles… and then take it from there… tho it has to be admitted that she does respond better at higher-than-recommended rpms…
I was told to just keep it under 70km for my scoot… 
I had a lawn mower once… revved the hell out of it from day one, ended up losing a lot of peak horsepower, it burned oil insanely quickly and the engine seized after two years… Moral of the story: no more harsh break in’s… 
[quote=“Mordeth”]
Here is a list of his other Tips and Tricks…if someone (smarter than me) could find major fault in one or two of them…then maybe we can discount this guy as an idiot…if not…then it should be harder for some people to take the counter to this arguement: mototuneusa.com/Thanks.htm[/quote]
Most of what the guy says SEEMS to make sense, though his styles a bit rhetorical, and in some cases its a little hard to believe he can second-guess the big boys.
For example, he claims that smaller intake valves give better performance, by increasing the velocity and inertia of the incoming fuel-air mixture. Doesn’t sound intrinsically implausible (and he claims dyno evidence), just hard to believe the development resources the big manufacturers were’nt able to confirm and adopt. They’d have no obvious vested interest in burying something like that.
He also claims that roughened intake path walls improve performance by avoiding laminar flow / creating turbulence which keeps the fuel from settling on them. I’d have thought fuel was more likely to get trapped by the pits in a roughened pipe, and turbulence was more likely to put it there. Some of it’ll get re-entrained in the airflow, but this seems likely to be less efficient than the original carburretted/FI atomisation. Any fluid dynamicists out there care to comment?
He uses raindrops on a windscreen as an illustration, but (a) reasoning by analogy is dodgy, especially in fluid dynamics which are highly scale-dependent (b) Its only half an analogy anyway, since he hasn’t got out the copper wheel engraving tool and roughed up half the windscreen. I doubt that half would keep dry if he did.
None of which proves he’s wrong (that would need controlled experiment), and even if he was wrong on one or two points it wouldn’t necessarily “discount this guy as an idiot” on all the others.
Sadly, without a lot of testing, you pays your money…etc
Ever wonder why a golfball has dimples? Yup, minimize the slow-moving boundary layer. The norm in porting these days is sand blast the intake ports and polish the exhausts. It all turned around some years ago when a tuner put a stock rough cast intake manifold on a flow bench and tested it, then polished it and tested it again. Flow was reduced.
Interesting. Didn’t know that.
If it’s standard practice though then yer (moto)man’s presentation of it as an example of (his) unconventional thinking seems a bit misleading. Hard break-in itself doesn’t seem to be as controversial as presented either. Perhaps that’s just showbiz.
Still don’t see how Honda et al could have missed the small-ports trick, but maybe that difference is (also?) a bit exaggerated.
Honda didn’t miss the small ports trick at all. Look at the vtec-II system they use on the later CB400s… Small ports are great for low-midrange torque and driveability. They just don’t flow enough at high revs. People have been trying to figure out how to get the best of both worlds since the 40s and 50s, with varying levels of success. Variable valve lift/timing, variable intake runner length/volume, it’s all been done before.
BTW, motoman is good at spouting a bunch of stuff that’s already pretty common knowledge and making out he thought of it himself. Just about every modern engine design feature had been tried back in the old days. Either they weren’t reliable enough, weren’t considered economically viable (cheap gas…) or they needed materials or controls that weren’t available at the time.
I have another piece of informal evidence against hard break-ins.
Two friends of a friend bought new Yamaha Fuzzys at the same time. One guy took it easy and did the recommended break-in. The other guy rode “as normal”. He was a fairly fast rider anyway and of course he must have been wanting to test his new bike’s power, so I guess this is a fairly hard break-in.
After a couple of months they’d both covered more than 1000km. They compared bikes. The one that was broken-in gently had more accelaration and top speed than the one that was ridden fairly hard.
Another case. My friend’s girlfriend bought a new scooter. The day after she bought it the two of them rode up to Hehuanshan and back on it. After that, the power was always poor.
Of course more loving care must go into the making of a sports bike engine, but I still don’t think it’s a good idea to thrash the nuts off it from the get-go. Vary the rpm, yes. But don’t run it too hard for too long.
Question to the experts - when the engines are being “hard” broken in - how much load is being put on the engine? Is it just free revving with no load - or are they putting a full or partial load on the engine through the dyno?
That would seem to my unexpert to make a huge difference in the break in.
Good point. The “hard break-ins” I mentioned in my post were with quite a load on the engine. Not sure about the load on Plasmatron’s lawnmower.
the load is the essential thing according to the hard knocks school of break ins… what they recommend is taking your bike directly from the dealer to a open road and before there’s even 20km on the clock (any more and it’s too late they say) warm the engine completely, then thrash it up to red line in each gear up and down the open road as if you were running 1/4 mile drags then engine braking from red line back down to low rpm in each gear… 
revving it to red linde in nuetral with no load will make it even “worse” than factory recommended break ins according to these hard break in, umm, “experts”…
[quote=“plasmatron”]the load is the essential thing according to the hard knocks school of break ins… what they recommend is taking your bike directly from the dealer to a open road and before there’s even 20km on the clock (any more and it’s too late they say) warm the engine completely, then thrash it up to red line in each gear up and down the open road as if you were running 1/4 mile drags then engine braking from red line back down to low rpm in each gear…[/quote]Crumbs!
So the stuff about sneaking into factories and watching them rev the nuts off engines is a red herring? (No load on the engine, so very different.)
[quote=“joesax”]
So the stuff about sneaking into factories and watching them rev the nuts off engines is a red herring? (No load on the engine, so very different.)[/quote]
In the quotes I’ve seen from people commenting on them redlining cars and bikes in the factory…they do it on a dyno (or the equivalent of) so it’s pretty much the same as riding on the street (except safer and more controlled).
As shown in this “spy” pic taken way back in the eighties:
[quote=“Mordeth”][quote=“joesax”]
So the stuff about sneaking into factories and watching them rev the nuts off engines is a red herring? (No load on the engine, so very different.)[/quote]
In the quotes I’ve seen from people commenting on them redlining cars and bikes in the factory…they do it on a dyno (or the equivalent of) so it’s pretty much the same as riding on the street (except safer and more controlled).[/quote]
Exactly. Redlining a bike on a dyno is under load, as opposed to leaving the bike in neutral and revving the shit out of it, which is just so painful to listen to and wouldn’t help break in the engine much at all I’d imagine.
[quote=“joesax”]
I have another piece of informal evidence against hard break-ins.
Two friends of a friend bought new Yamaha Fuzzys at the same time. One guy took it easy and did the recommended break-in. The other guy rode “as normal”. He was a fairly fast rider anyway and of course he must have been wanting to test his new bike’s power, so I guess this is a fairly hard break-in.
After a couple of months they’d both covered more than 1000km. They compared bikes. The one that was broken-in gently had more accelaration and top speed than the one that was ridden fairly hard.[/quote]
The problem with riding “as normal” is that he might have been doing a set amount of RPMs for a long period of time. Which isn’t in tune with the Hard Break-in method.
And the problem with going up a mountain is that the engine will actually be in lowwish RPMs with a very high load, a.k.a. “lugging” . Which also goes against a Hard Break-in’s rules.