Motorcycle break-in

I am going to restate something I just posted on Wildguzzi.com, a discussion board for owners and fans of the greatest motorcycles in the world, Moto Guzzi.

It addresses an old problem: the fact that most bikes have break-in periods during which you are asked by the manufacturer to voluntarily limit how hard you ride the bike. Moto Guzzi has a particularly long break-in, with a series of gradually diminishing restrictions in RPM.

Some bikers (I am one) try to follow the restrictions as well as we can. Others advocate the "ride it like you stole it" philosophy: start riding the bike the way you intend to ride it all the time.

I look at it this way:

The manufacturer knows that bike buyers want to run their new bikes hard or at least without niggling restrictions, and they certainly don't want to deliberately do things that makes new buyers have a negative opinion of their product.

But they also know the cost of warranty work, especially as it directly affects their bottom line.

So when a manufacturer takes the risk of alienating their customers by putting in those break-in restrictions, they must be calculating that the cost of increased warranty work on bikes that have not been broken in correctly is greater than the cost of lost repeat business because of break-in restrictions.

If it is that important for the manufacturer, it must be important to the motorcycle. And as I pay a good bit of money for my motorcycle, I want it to last a loooooong time.