Car and Motorcycle

Bikers Guide : How to Treat Your New Motorcycle ?

There are plenty of myths and bullshit stories about treat & running-in a new bike, but there’s a simple solution – follow the manufacturers’ guidelines.

When a bike comes from a manufacturer, they generally give you a running-in period of between 500-600 miles and a certain rev limit to adhere to (they might also suggest phased periods), and they do that for a few good reasons.



Firstly, the oil they use in a brand-new engine is usually quite a low-spec, monograde oil to allow the internal parts to bed in to each other. Every single component will have high and low spots, and they use an oil that will absorb that most efficiently. There’s no point in having a brand-new engine and putting fully-synthetic racing oil inside it for running it in for 500 miles – it’s a pointless exercise and it’ll defeat the whole object.

Secondly, they do it because within the engine build process, there’s an obvious timescale in production. Now and again, when they’re building cylinder heads and fitting top collars and collets, and installing such items by machine very quickly, sometimes a little component isn’t fitted as well as it can be or should be, so they allow this running-in period, which generally will settle in these parts.

If you have a brand-new bike and rag the shit out of it straight away, you’ve got to take things on your own back. It’s not the way to do it and manufacturers spend a lot of time (and money) on development and racing, and so they work out what works and what doesn’t.

From a racing point of view, it’s a different ball game altogether. If we build a race engine, we’re not looking to get 20,000 miles out of it – usually 1,500-2,000 miles is what we’re after – but we want maximum performance pretty quickly.

There’s no running-in period as such and no special oil is used. All the manufacturers will take their bikes to maximum revs as they leave the production line before being crated up, just to see if there are any instant problems. The difference to caning it on the road is there’s no load on the bike as it’s done on a rolling road or dyno. You can’t force an engine to rev : if it doesn’t want to rev, it just won’t rev.

Keep It Smooth & Wisely

Some riders assume that just by keeping a bike below its recommended rev ceiling during running-in it’ll cause no harm, but over-loading an engine in too high a gear can cause more damage than bouncing it off the limiter. You want the engine to be as free-running as possible, so choose gears wisely and keep the throttle at speed with the engine.

The old myth regarding not running-in an engine so it will loosen it up? It doesn’t work like that. For arguments sake, take a cast iron-bored engine, like most older sportsbikes. You have different types of rings in the bore, you’ve got different materials, there are so many different variables, and with cast iron stuff you have to take your time running it in. What’ll happen is it’ll scuff because of the expansion rate of the materials. If you don’t run them in as a unit, something will expand more than another and a ring might nip up.

It’s not so bad now we’ve got nikasil plating and ceramics. We’re at a stage now with the motors from, say, Triumph where they have wet liners – pieces of tube that are attached into the cylinder and are plated so you can just pull them out and replace them if need be.

Nikasil plated engines don’t need so much running-in nowadays. It’s more of a quick 20-minute bedding-in process – just because tolerances and the finishes are so good. Even by running your finger up a cast iron bore and a nikasil bore, you’ll feel the differences straight away. Even though the tolerances are much improved these days, some engines are better than others and the power differential can be huge. You’ll get a Monday morning engine and a Friday afternoon engine, and sometimes a Wednesday post-lunch engine where Giuseppe has just received a cracking bout of intercourse for the first time in months...

Extras ?

We’ve had a few people asking about using a detergent-type engine flush after the running-in period, and I wouldn’t recommend it. These engine flushes make a number of claims but are generally aimed at high mileage bikes. Oils are made up of synthetics and get carbon deposits built up, and you might get parts cleaned out internally that you don’t necessarily want cleaned out that might mean you get a knackered engine.

Your main dealer will drain the oil out, fit a new filter and fill it with the recommended oil. If there are no other advocated running-in guidelines in the manual, ride it like you stole it – but stick to your service schedule. The majority of manufacturers will cover basic eventualities, but they don’t know what conditions that bike’s been used in, and that’s when you need your service schedule adapted, changed, and altered to suit the required usage of that bike.

If you bought a bike, had its first service done, and you do a lot of mileage in all sorts of conditions, you might want to look after that bike a little bit more. We see bikes come through the workshop, they’ve had their first service done and the owner has simply obeyed the mileage schedule for it, but have knackered it because of the conditions they’ve ridden it through. You can’t treat a bike like a car, it’s as simple as that.