Well, the above advice is dead wrong for an ABC engine.

I would have thought that, by now, it is rather common knowledge that a non-ringed engine needs to get up to operating temperature QUICKLY on the first run it avoid "squeezing" the piston.

skrez, I bought a pair of these engines in 1988, one ringed and one ABC (or whatever). They both ran flawlessly for many, many hours, and the ringed one is still flying. I sold both some time back, but I know where the ringed one ended up at and I saw it in a Sig Somethin' Extra just last month. I replaced the ring at over 50 hours, back in the mid-90s; AFAIK it still has the original bearings.

Red is correct; the liner peeling problem did not emerge until later. I have had four SF series engines, all purchased in 1987-88, and still run one of the 40 SFs in a Sig Kougar. Much of the run time I accumulated in all of them was with 15% Cool Power fuel with 17% all-synthetic oil. I'm not going to get into a castor/synthetic urination competition, but rest assured that normal oil contents in every brand of model airplane fuel I am aware of are sufficient to the task; unless YOU mis-use/abuse the engine. An exception to that could well be the crap plating that OS used on a a lot of engines a few years back that had all the peeling problems, that downunder referred to. No doubt that heavy castor use prevented many of those peeling instances; but since you, the modeler, have no control over how the engine was manufactured, you have to hope for the best and operate the engine sensibly.

Again, from my observations (and reading between the lines on posts here), most folks who toast model engines are either clueless in the first place or are trying to extract the absolute last bit of power out of an engine. That latter is a big culprit. There are all sorts of suggestions on just what is the proper "slightly rich" mixture, to avoid engine overheating, but since each engine is different you cannot go by rpm reading, etc. If you follow this rule of thumb, you'll probably be okay... make sure that the engine is blowing a faint smoke trail at all times. That smoke is really unburned oil, which means that the engine is getting enough to cool/lubricate itself.

Enjoy your new engine. They really aren't "making them like that anymore". OS does still make quality stuff, but it appears to me that their "mass market" engines are now built to a price point instead of a level of quality. The SF engines were built to a level of quality, and were rather expensive in their day.