1199 break in

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Just got my new 1199 and love it. Break-in according to the manual seems pretty severe. Keep under 6k rpm for first 600 miles and then under 7k rpm until 1550? With my 1098r the Ducati dealership told me it was a race bike and that there was no break-in period. Any advice out there? Do I need to stick with the manual's recommended break-in period? Thanks.
 
Just got my new 1199 and love it. Break-in according to the manual seems pretty severe. Keep under 6k rpm for first 600 miles and then under 7k rpm until 1550? With my 1098r the Ducati dealership told me it was a race bike and that there was no break-in period. Any advice out there? Do I need to stick with the manual's recommended break-in period? Thanks.

I did your dealer breakin and had not smoke after 100 miles.
 
"Search"

Just got my new 1199 and love it. Break-in according to the manual seems pretty severe. Keep under 6k rpm for first 600 miles and then under 7k rpm until 1550? With my 1098r the Ducati dealership told me it was a race bike and that there was no break-in period. Any advice out there? Do I need to stick with the manual's recommended break-in period? Thanks.

Brother you really need to do a search on this first since this issue has been spoken about LONG HARD and CONTINUOUS man. Congrats on your new bike and you will read TONS of views on this in other threads.

My personal (opinion) is that you skip the entire section in manual on break in and beat that thing HARD and use EVERY damn option on that bike to its fullest!
 
Welcome Racing. There are several threads on here about break-in. Generally two schools of thoughts 1. Go by the book and don't do anything to void your warranty and 2. Ride like you stole it to seal the rings. I personally went somewhere in-between without being excessively hard and had no smoke issues or excessive oil use. I think it all depends on the individual's comfort levels around potential warranty abuse. Good luck!
 
key thing is on the break in is that you want to seat the piston rings without glazing the cylinders. best way to do it is by putting max load on the engine. the way I like to do it is I usually do that by getting the bike up to 25-30 mph then putting the bike in 6th gear and go WOT till 120mph. slow down and repeat like 10 times. I also bed the brake pads at the same time. doing gradual slowdowns going progressively faster in the breaking as I run through the 10 runs. After that, I ride the bike like it owes me money.
 
I did 200 vaguely sensible miles, mainly under 6k but also above. Now i;m caning it though with 400+miles on it. No smoke at all and only a tiny bit of oil used.

Rag it.
 
I've always gone pretty much by the book on break in every one of my bikes including six ducs and never had a valve or other issue engine related and I put lots of miles on my bikes.

And even 1500 miles is no big deal if you plan to ride it and not keep it parked.Too many ducs out there people don't ride.

To each his own.

since i am unable to ride this bike like i stole it (still a relatively new superbike rider), i chose to go by the book.
 
Rode it like I stole it with RP Break-In Oil until 1200 miles. At 3600, no issues that I've noticed and NO smoking evar! :)
 
just ignore the break in period suggestion. I haven't heard of warranty being denied for not following the suggested break in. Almost every person I know that knows engines has said to hammer it hard (piston rings, valves/etc).

There are people who have uncrated the bike and first miles put on were on the track. If you track bikes - that would be even better, just take it out there for a track day and break it in. It won't hurt it.
 
Dealer told me not to baby it, but also not to over do it...I'm confused.
 
Dealer told me not to baby it, but also not to over do it...I'm confused.

Here:

http://www.mototuneusa.com/break_in_secrets.htm

Will clear things up.

I wrote "Break-In Secrets" after successfully applying this method
to approximately 300 new engines, all without any problems whatsoever.

Links to this article now appear on hundreds of motorsports discussion forums from all over the world. The reason is that over time, large numbers of people have done a direct comparison between my method and the owner's manual method, and the news of their success is spreading rapidly.

The results are always the same... a dramatic increase in power at all RPMs. In addition, many professional mechanics have disassembled engines that have used this method, to find that the condition of the engine is much better than when the owner's manual break-in method has been used.

The thing that makes this page so controversial is that there have been many other break-in articles
written in the past which will contradict what has been written here.

Several factors make the older information on break-in obsolete.

The biggest factor is that engine manufacturers now use a much finer honing pattern in the cylinders than they once did. This in turn changes the break-in requirements, because as you're about to learn, the window of opportunity for achieving an exceptional ring seal is much smaller with
newer engines than it was with the older "rough honed" engines.

In addition, there is a lot less heat build up in the cylinders from ring friction
due to the finer honing pattern used in modern engines.

The other factors that have changed are the vastly improved metal casting and machining
technologies which are now used. This means that the "wearing in" of the new parts
involves significantly less friction and actual wear than it did in the distant past.

With that in mind ...
 
I'll be damned. Never seen that before. All this time I have been doing it hard like that and knew nothing about this article! LOL

Gunny - as we were discussing in another thread - take it to the track. thats running it hard. You can't (and shouldn't) be running it "hard" on the street. Whatever you're doing on the street isn't really "hard" or "hammering" it.
 
To me the most important thing about break-in is not to lug the engine.
 
Think about what the manual has to cover...its not just the seating of the compression rings in the engine. Its the breaking in of "everything" ie. Brakes, Tires, Chain, Sprockets, Rider!!!, etc etc

Could you imagine if they wrote "take the bike to redline over and over at wide open throttle as soon as you get it off the dealer lot"

You can see the problem with that....
 
If you break it in according to the factory specs they can't deny a warranty issue. I suspect they kind of like it when owners break in the engines hard because it makes it easy to deny warranty claims. I pampered mine for the first 1000km, then did what I was told to by the dealer (don't be nice anymore).
 
If you break it in according to the factory specs they can't deny a warranty issue. I suspect they kind of like it when owners break in the engines hard because it makes it easy to deny warranty claims. I pampered mine for the first 1000km, then did what I was told to by the dealer (don't be nice anymore).

Have they /ever/ or anyone ever experienced an actual denied warranty claim because of not taking it over 6k rpm's during break in ? I haven't heard of any and its a very slippery slope for them to start looking at ECU data to see if the owner followed break in procedures before accepting a claim.

On top of that - the best time to seal/seat the engine is during the first few hundred miles. If you don't - you've lost that opportunity. It's like seating brakes - they can't tell you to drive it to 85 and grab the brakes as hard as you can without locking them up 5x to seat them properly.

So if you want to take it easy - certainly your choice. But I have not heard of any Ducati denials for warranty claim for failing engine break in procedures, so I would discount that reasoning.
 

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