I suspect there is some truth to Mark Lambert's comment that most break-in
procedure "rules" are myth. For example, when we bought our Caravan back in
November of '85, "they" told us to break it in as we wanted to drive it, and
the owner's manual said more or less the same thing in different words. So
we took it out on the road and haven't looked back since. It now has nearly
75,000 miles, and runs like a champ. Of course, it has the nifty Mitsubishi
2.6 liter 4-cylinder. Maybe the best idea is to drive it easily for maybe a
hundred, then let 'er rip, and try to avoid too much sustained running at the
same rpm and the same load during this early period.
Some time back in the early days of SOL'dom, we had occasional comments on
beer, specifically the proper beer, ale, or stout from across the pond to
consume while replacing various parts that had fallen off our cars. Hence...
This past weekend a local liquor shop proprietor gave me a bottle of oatmeal
stout from a brewer near London called Young's, with the only price being my
opinion of it. (Not a bad deal. I wonder if there is a job future in that
sort of thing.) The orange label on the bottle described Young's as one of
London's last remaining independent breweries. They had brewed this stuff
until 1950 "when local demand dropped off" and had recently restarted its
production using the original recipe. The stout was quite good. It was not
quite as sweet as Samuel Smith's oatmeal stout, and slightly more bitter. It
had much the same body and "fizziness" however. I suspect it would be easier
to drink a second or third pint of Young's, except that I didn't have a second
or third botttle to try, and I wasn't working on a car at the time.
Everyone have a nice brace of holidays, and, come the New Year, be especially
careful of other folks who might have had a few too many stouts before driving
home.
Jim Muller
|