Breaking in an engine on a road trip

[jkmcrg]

Just finished rebuilding my 2.1L digi with new p&c, cam, and am leaving on a road trip tomorrow. What is proper road trip break in strategy?
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1984 Westfalia Orwell (crispy)
2.2L Digifant
Automatic transmission

[GWTWTLW]

The key is to not drive the same speed for more than a few minutes at a time for the first thousand miles. You should vary it as much as possible. My last engine had 75 miles on it and I took it on a 3k road trip. It's hard to vary your speed when you have an open highway in front of you but I would range from 55-75 every few minutes. Drove everyone else on the road crazy but oh well. You don't have to particularly baby the engine either. I drove if fairly hard at times. Didn't have much of a choice with some of the hills. GoWesty has a pretty good engine breakin checklist in their site. I tried to follow it as closely as I could.
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89 Syncro Westy - GW 2.5, now with a double knob job
@gwtwtlw

[Wildthings]

Take it out through the city tonight when there isn't much traffic and drive it relatively hard going from stop light to stop light or stop sign to stop sign. Don't baby it and by the time you get 10-15 miles on it your breakin will be pretty much complete. Do try to avoid prolonged idling.

I don't know if this is done all that much anymore, but it used to be common for the speedos on new cars to be disconnected while they were on the lot and likely driven from one dealership to another by twenty somethings. The vehicles might rack up a couple of hundred "I don't care" miles and then someone would buy the rig and go through the wasted effort to break their "new" rig in easy. What a joke.

I had a friend whose "new" pickup had towed another pickup most of a thousand miles from the factory to his local dealership prior to his buying it, it would have been absolutely stupid to "break" the engine in at that point.

Drive it like you stole it and don't worry about it.

[Merian]

[SSWesty]

An easy way to break up the constant load on the freeway is to take an off ramp every 20 minutes or so. You can let the engine compression slow you down on the off ramp and then back through the gears getting on. This is a simple way to totally change the load on the engine.

I did an 800 mile road trip when my rebuild had about 200 miles on it. Runs nice and strong 4,000 miles later. Happy travels.

[jkmcrg]

Drove around town last night loading the pistons then letting off, the only problem is that's a lot harder to put a real load on the engine

The off ramp is a great idea.... will do! And keep an eye on the tach. This'll be a fun filled day long drive! I'll let y'all know if we make it.
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1984 Westfalia Orwell (crispy)
2.2L Digifant
Automatic transmission