Hi Bob,

I did not know what is special about it, but I just did some googling. Seems to be a mineral oil with a lot of anti-wear zinc and not much detergent, which makes sense. I see your point about only 5L containers, you could try motorcycle repair shops, they might sell smaller quantities, or if you have a garage that does engine rebuilds go see if you can blag a mug full.

I also found it is called break-in oil if that helps.

Of course, every new car will have it in, you could always "borrow" some out of next doors new car

I'd just give it a heavy dose of light steam oil until it stops coming out black from the exhaust. I mostly run mine on air so just a generous squirt of light oil into the valve chest before the initial run and make sure what comes out the other side won't get on the paint or display base.

"Running In" oils quite often are less sophisticated than "normal" oils. The idea is that parts, such as piston rings and bores can bed to (Wear ) to each other. It used to be that many years ago, colloidal graphite was added to the oil, this may have been good for the bearings, but did little to improve ring bedding.

I have come across a special "running in" fuel for diesel engines. It contained a very slight abrasive which was delivered into the cylinder to improve ring bedding.

Modern cylinder liner honing techniques such as plateau honing have done much to reduce running in times. Although the modern car probably takes a bout 20K miles before it really beds in properly.

Having had an engine returned for oil passing in to the exhaust, (Caused by bore glazing from running for long periods at high idle to set reel speed on a combine harvester, ) The solution was to run it at full load rated speed for hours on end. Eventually, the rings wore through the glaze and oil control began to improve.

Probably the best thing is to run the engine under gradually increasing loads and speeds, finishing up with a run at full speed, full load. The load is probably more important than the sped.

When we were on holiday in USA one tear we hired a car to drive from Atlanta to Florida and onto Oklahoma and return. Probably the car had never travelled more than 20 miles at a time.

On the morning of day 2, the car had consumed a lot of oil, but as each day passed the oil consumed reduced, until by the time that we handed it back it was no longer using oil. We had spent a fortnight running it in!

Howard

Bob, Colloidal graphite is still available from Graphogen at around £20 per tube , but if you PM me your details l can supply you some of mine cos you dnt need a lot . It's main advantage is that it plasticisers the sufaces of the metal so that instead of the peaks being chopped off, the metal is deformed and moved down into the valleys . Trevor

I always assumed a running in oil was just a cheap oil that you used to get any machining remnants out of oilways and such before putting the good stuff in! Whenever I built a car engine that was certainly what I used it for; just a cheap oil (mineral on stuff that would never work hard, synthetic on anything likely to get baked in its life) to get rid of any assembly grease and such. Run for 100 miles or so (less for a track engine obviously) and then new oil and filter of the type you intended to use normally.

I'm in no way saying this is right, just what I've done before and the reasons I was doing it personally.

Interesting about the bedding in of piston rings.

Not sure which sort of lubrications is used on the Merrywheather hydrostatic or mechanical for the cylinders ? I know this not a locomotive but standard running in practice was to set the oil feeds to maximum on the lubricators check the bearing temperatures and oil levels frequently and when it’s felt the engine had run in ease off or restrict the oil feeds as required.

Jon,

Well, I can't quite make out if your icon picture is a TVR or a Triumph GT6! If the latter then that's who I worked for. Although originally I did an apprenticeship with Alfred Herberts, Machine Tools in Coventry I went into the automotive trade due to having worked on CNC machine tool development and Triumph were looking for someone to develop the application of the 'new technology' of digital fuel injection. I had engine experience through racing a motor cycle and rebuilding and tuning my own engines.

After the closure of Canley I went into racing working on F3, F3000, Indy Car and WSC (Jaguar Silk Cut cars), eventually going into F1 with Benneton, Tyrell, Arrows and Red Bull on the engine teams. Then I worked for Ricardo doing a stint in China as consultant to a domestic manufacturer and then for Jaguar on the set-up of their engine facility out there. So, all in all, I've worked most of my life with engines, both road and race specs for 40 odd years. My abiding interest has always been my first love of actually working on machine tools. It is very difficult to get out of one's blood!

One final aside; at Triumph we used a heavy straight grade oil as an engine 'build oil', it was an SAE140 grade and was nicknamed by the engineers as 'liquid grease'. It protected the bearings, pistons and rings, and especially the tappets and cams during first cranking.

Bob: Thank you for your PM.

Martin

Edited By Oily Rag on 11/03/2021 10:38:49

I didn't try it yet, but I have been advised on this forum that abrasive pase which wears itself and breake down fast and can be run into mating parts *does* exist and it is called Timesaver(TM) lapping paste available in the UK.

So maybe try that as a small additive?

I would like for someone more experienced to comment on that though.

Martin