Did the Catch Can Work? 10k MILE TEST

this is the yuck that came out of the catch can on the golf r about 10 000 miles ago i pulled the intake manifold off my 2019 golf r to inspect for carbon build-up carbon buildup on the backs of the intake valves is super common on direct injection engine at that time we cleaned cylinder 1 and cylinder 2 and added a catch can to answer the question does a catch can prevent carbon buildup on the backs of your intake valves so what we're going to do today in this video is i'm going to pull that intake manifold and pull those fuel injectors back off well compared to what they look like before the catch can and hopefully definitively answer that question now i've already done a step-by-step video on how to remove and install the intake i'll be sure to link that down below while i'm working on the manifold let's talk a little bit about the catch can that i use for this setup this is the racing line catch can which has both the pcv plate on top of the cam bridge and the can itself right here near the coolant bottle because i have a golf r this also required me to delete the upper portion of the windshield washer fluid bottle reducing the windshield washer fluid capacity so once we get all that stuff off and evaluate the conditions of our valves i'll also talk a little bit about some other pros and cons that i've experienced over the last year and a half or so with this catch can in addition to that during one of the times emptying the catch can i sent that sample off to blackstone labs to have it analyzed so we'll go a little bit more in depth on that and the oil analysis a little later on okay so we got our manifold mostly loose i'm just going to kind of wiggle it the last little bit out all right let's see what we got we'll first pull our little divider plates out this is cylinder four and see there's a pretty good amount of goop on the top side three and four are the ones that i didn't clean before installing the catch can so not too bad just a little bit down here in the corner one and two are the ones i did clean so when we put it all back together this one was totally clean as you can see there's some buildup on it but not a ton and then cylinder one you can actually see the trailing where the airflow is that's kind of cool a little bit of dirt on it and some debris down here at the bottom this is really really sticky sticky goo there we go i would say one and four are about the same and two and three are about the same which makes sense because the native airflow is going to come up and into probably two and three more directly where one and four are a little less direct our moment of truth let's see what the backs of these valves look like so here's cylinder one this is one that we did clean it's pretty clean still you can see up at the top of the cylinder there is some some kind of yuck built up on there but the valve itself looks pretty good don't mind that dirt down there we'll get that cleaned out moving on to cylinder two the other one that we cleaned you can see some build up along the back side there but on the valve itself it looks pretty good there's a bit of a ring starting to develop around where the valve meets the seat and there's some yuck at the back for sure but overall that looks pretty good that looks better at 20 000 than it did at 10 000. moving on to number three now this is one we did not clean and weirdly it doesn't look that different in fact i i would venture to say that it's cleaner now than it was before holy cow which makes me wonder is this cleaner because of the catch can or is it cleaner because something else we're doing now there's some buildup you can see at the valve there and down at the back on that side but all in all that's not terrible number four looks a lot like three you can see a bit of carbon build up there at the top side of the valve and some starting to form at the back but the valve itself that's pretty darn clean that's really clean compared to how it looked before so this was the before when we put it back together and now here we're looking at the after all right while i wrap my mind around what we just saw with the intake valves let's go ahead and pull the fuel rail off and take a look at the injectors okay with all four of our injectors out let's see what we can see so like the top-down view doesn't look all that bad there's some crust on there but look we kind of expect that remember this section lives in the combustion chamber so there's gonna be there's gonna be some sadness in there as we look at the tips of the injectors we can see there's some crust built up on them but it's really not all that bad i would say cylinder two might have the most i gotta say i kind of expected them to be worse than they are so i am absolutely floored at how little carbon we found on the backs of the intake valve i went ahead and sent a sample of the contents of the catch can over to blackstone labs and here's what they said there's more water than oil but that's a catch can sample for you its purpose is to isolate oil vapors and prevent contaminants like water and fuel from recirculating the water interfered with the flashpoint test for fuel it probably messed with the spectral exam and viscosity too insolubles were sky high at eight percent showing heavy oxidation in the oil that we skimmed off it's common for oil within a catch can to look very different usually worse than oil sampled from the main sump or the oil filter try sampling from one of those next time so what they're saying is basically the majority of what was in that catch can was water which is kind of what we all expected and any other testing on the yuck that's inside of there isn't super accurate so really the main thing we confirmed is there's some yuck inside of that catch can but it's primarily water now because they said it was mostly water what i wanted to do was actually put this in the freezer and see just how much water it was so it's not completely frozen there's a little bit at the bottom that isn't but this whole top part is frozen so all of that is the water that uh blackstone had mentioned definitely the majority water a little bit down there not frozen but this also brings up a good point if you're running a catch can in the winter time you may need to actually take it out or make sure that it's not frozen over before you fire your car up and you have like a complete blockage or something especially if it's filled all the way so confirmed frozen solid now when i changed the oil at 20 000 i went ahead and sent a sample of the engine oil over to blackstone as well now this was zero w30 and i'm pretty sure it was castrol we also added liquid molyceratec when i did the oil change so what they said on the engine oil was that ceratec is harmless additive that won't skew the wear metal so feel free to use it we found quite a bit more iron than average and some extra aluminum and copper ii but nothing that looks like an obvious issue metals actually look quite good averages based on 6200 miles this was also a low mile engine so if you haven't done many oil changes yet the metals might look even better as and nice start to this vw's file so basically what they're saying is there may also still be some lingering stuff from when the engine was first built so all in all we have really nothing to worry about according to the folks at blackstone labs it'll really be interesting throughout the life of this car to send a sample out with every oil change this threw me off completely here's what my assumption was gonna be when we evaluated the intake manifold i would pull the intake manifold off and the carbon buildup would basically be the same as it was when we pulled the manifold off at 10 some carbon buildup scattered across all four cylinders maybe a little bit worse on three and four because we cleaned one and two so it had a little bit of a head start showing that the catch can didn't do anything at all instead what we found was four cylinders that had some buildup which we're gonna get with our direct injection engine but really not that bad at all what really shocked me though is that three and four were not that much worse off than one and two so does that mean that the catch can did actually help or have we introduced another situation to the car that led to that maybe it's the 300 mile 400 mile whatever road trip i took last week that had an impact on it and here's the problem with testing stuff like this there are so many variables that it's hard to identify an absolute yes or an absolute no while i am much more optimistic today than it was yesterday about catch can i still am having trouble saying a hundred percent without a doubt this will solve your carbon buildup issues because clearly we still saw some carbon buildup on this engine i emptied that catch cam i think twice and i'm probably about due for a third empty and each time it had a little bit more than two cups of fluid in it so i let it go pretty full that's a lot of water and contaminants that we've kept out of our engine now there was some things about this catch can and perhaps this catch can specifically i really don't like it all i don't love that we had to give up part of our washer fluid bottle out of all the things i don't like that's probably the least important the thing that i absolutely hate about this can is that you either have to find a very thin tube and use some kind of extractor to empty it or you're pulling the can out now when you pull the can out you have to be careful because if you pull the can up and tip it all those hoses run back to your engine so if it's really full all that liquid is going to run right back into your engine which is not a good thing clearly that is a bad time so i don't like that there's no valve or anything down at the bottom in order to empty it even if it had a valve that allowed you to empty most of it i think that would be a super victory especially when we're talking about a six or seven hundred dollar piece of equipment that you have to remove in order to drain and technically you are supposed to replace that engine mount bolt when you remove it and this one uses the actual engine mount bolt to hold the cannon instead of bolting on top of that little stud that's on the bolt already seems like a little bit short-sighted to me on that design perhaps there's a reason they did it but it's not like we have to secure that catch can with an engine mount bolt when most likely a 10 millimeter nut on a stud will hold it just fine one of the other things that i've noticed pretty frequently since installing the catch can that i never had an issue with before is a burning oil smell now i haven't been able to identify any leaks or anything like that like the engine is as clean as you would expect it at 20k but i i get a frequent smell of burning oil i reached out to racing line and they said that that shouldn't be happening that i must have a leak well i don't have a leak so uh to me that's got to be a product of having the catch cam especially because we didn't have any of that before installing it so here's what we're left with does the catch can definitively help prevent carbon buildup on a direct injection engine i can't say yes to that but i also can't say no to that either we've seen a change in the carbon buildup on the backs of our intake valves but as i've expected throughout this process there's so many variables that we can't attribute 100 of that to our catch can however we can say that it is different today than it was 10 000 miles ago which has me scratching my head i don't know so i'm gonna throw it back to you guys what do you think what other tests can we do how can we maybe move forward and isolate yes or no definitively on this catch can drop that down in the comments as far as leaving this one on or taking it off for the sake of me being lazy i'm probably going to leave it on at least for now with that i'm going to wrap it up if you want to see how to remove an intake how to reseal a fuel injector or the install on this catch can i'll link all those videos down below with that i'm out have an awesome day and i'll talk to you next time bye bye

Channel: HumbleMechanic

Views: 181,838

Rating: 4.9254079 out of 5

Keywords: Engine, Gasoline Direct Injection, Audi (Automobile Company), BMW (Automobile Company), Gasoline (Fuel), Auto Mechanic (Profession), Mechanic (Profession), Technician (Profession), GDI, Golf R, VW Carbon build up, how to clean intake valves, TSI engine, VW TSI engine, Carbon build up on intake valves, GDI fail, intake manifold DIY, how to replace an intake manifold, p0215, failed VW intake manifold, catch can, do catch cans work, will catch can freeze, will catch cans fix

Id: idGreEjWu7I

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021