use self control and protect your investment.

then after only 10 hrs its hammer time with no worries cause thats why you have a warranty.

Yup.....we had that happen with a pair of 2.5 OFFSHORE Mercury Racing outboards........they pulled out the rule book and ran the scan tool........did they honor the warranty......YES.... but it took some time and lots of dealer/customer pressure on Mercury to do it. It was close but they did warranty it. Follow the the manual and go an extra 2 or 3 hours in good faith if a problem does arise.....but those motors are basically issue free and turn key every time...GO HAVE SOME FUN

Correct me if I am wrong here. I know the computer tracks what rpm's the motor has run at. (I was amazed to find out just how much time I have spent in no wake zones.) But I don't think it tells you WHEN those rpms were logged.

I can understand 3/4 throttle for the first 2-3 hours......after that! Run it like you normally would if it had 100 hrs on it.

We just built brand new engines and sent them to the dyno....he ran them to near 6,000 rpms and they were just put together!!!

No time record is kept. My post would only be relevant if something happened during the break-in period.

I think you are pretty accurate here. This is unconfirmed, but a Mercury rep. at the LA Boat Show told me they can even tell when it was at WOT (I would presume relative to the number of engine hours, rather than the date and time).

Please ignore all the uninformed people who say to just run the engine at full throttle from minute one. They have an extremely small sample size to base their opinions on. I don't know of any "major" engine manufacturer who recommends this, nor do they durability test their own engines without a break-in period.

Michael

Then how about the issue of Dyno testing. All major engine builders dyno their engines immediately after assembly. Run them hard after minutes of break-in.

Kinda more of a question than a reply, but do the ECU's on the 496's (or any other high performance EFI Mercury) not have a break-in mode like the outboards do?

I know on a new 280, the ECU runs in a break-in mode until it has determined the motor has been "broken in"

I know the engine builders do this. I would like to hear more thoughts on this one as well.

I had a guy whos ecu tracked that 1/2 of the engines short life was pegged at the rev limiters.