I must have broken in about 10 of them in the last year. Yup, what the manual suggests works great. With the last couple, I've only felt the need to do the breakin for one tank's worth of fuel. Yes, you do the breakin needling with the throttle open completely. You're controlling the revs with the needle. And the first tank is to do the "needle dance". I then run a tank to test the lowspeed needle setting. So the engines are getting one full tank on the ground and usually about another half tank running on the ground while I check the throttle up response and sometimes dink the low speed needle.

I've found that the trick that makes the breakin completely safe is with the needle going from rich to lean. Move the needle slowly and as soon as the engine goes into 2cycle pause. Then go slowly from click to click and as soon as you hear any slowdown go a couple clicks back rich. It'll usually be picking up speed each click. After awhile I could tell that one of the clicks didn't pick the speed up. When I started noticing that, I used that for the 10second fast run.

I let the engine cool down completely after the first tank. Toward the end of the tank, I get an idea where the highspeed needle wants to be. I leave that setting and let it cool down. The next tank is for idle adjustment. The pinch test works great. It usually only takes a couple of tweaks. A couple of engines were good to go without tweaking the lowspeed.

None of them have given problems on their first flights other than having too high an idle setting on the TX. A couple have needed the lowspeed leaned out a bit after a couple of flights. It might be that they weren't completely broken in with one tank, but they didn't let the airplane down, and the highspeed needle setting was sufficiently rich to be safe for the engine for sure.

They're excellent engines. You often do "get what you pay for".