Quote:
Originally Posted by pcspecialist
bookieboy is correct, if you experience problems, it is because the engine was not built correctly. There should never be metal to metal bearing contact so there is nothing to "completely mate". A hard break-in would expose the problem right away while a gentle break-in may allow you to get hundreds, maybe even thousands of miles out of the engine, but, it will still suffer an early death.
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I suppose that is true, nowadays, thanks to good air filters, and sophisticated lube oils. But this was not always true. People still drove Model A Fords, and even Model T Fords were still in use, especially on ranches where I lived as a kid. New Buicks and Chevrolets still had poured bearings. So had steam locomotives. In our neighborhood there was an old lady who drove a Willys Knight. Time for an overhaul, and it went to a garage in Canoga Park where lurked two bachelor brothers who worked on these types of cars. They were in their seventies, and chewed "Red Man" tobacco. To a young boy, these two were what American men were supposed to be. It never occured to them that they couldn't overhaul an engine, so they just went ahead and did it, like they had since 1905. When they started, they told me, it had been a livery and blacksmith shop that repaired engines as a sideline until the horse end of it went out in the late twenties, then they concentrated on cars. It cost $80.00 dollars to re-ring and pour new bearings, and "burn it in" on a Pierce-Arrow engine driven dynomometer. Engine was run on that machine with the head off at low speed for an hour or two, then speeded up. They ran it all day that way. Then changed the oil the next morning, put the head back on, and started it back up. Only now it was motoring the Pierce-Arrow engine. "Gotta run it under a load so as to seat the rings, yuh know". After a couple of hours of this, no smoke, and the engine purred like a kitten. They had the "touch"...ARH