How To Clean Carbon Off Your Engine!

the intake valves on this engine are all yucked up with carbonate and we're going to show you how to clean them shops use specialized tools to remove carbon later in this video we're going to test DIY methods versus the shot method to see which one gets valves cleaner DirecTV injection is amazing technology which allows engines to be more efficient and make more horsepower prior fuel injection systems called port injection had fuel injectors located in the intake manifold Runners that would spray fuel in with the air that's getting sucked into the engine this Fuel and air mixture getting sucked past the intake valves keeps that valve clean which is why port injection cars do not have issues with carbon buildup direct injection cars have fuel injectors that are located inside the combustion chamber since these injectors sprayed directly into the engine no fuel washes over the intake valves when our PCV system recirculates crankcase Vapors which have oil in them back into the engine carbon will slowly build up on these valves carbon buildup can cause cold start misfires and they progressively get worse as the carbon buildup gets worse that's a problem because if you have misfires until you your car gets warm this will be causing unburned fuel to be dumped down your exhaust eventually which will kill your catalytic converter and if you didn't notice the reason why they're cutting them out of cars right now at alarming rates is because cats are real expensive if you would like to know if your engine has carbon buildup inside of it you can purchase a bore scope on Amazon something like one of these that is about 20 or 30 dollars this will give you the ability to look inside the intake manifold of your car at the valves are the ones that are least accessible and that will allow you to see if you have carbon buildup on your valves to do this you'll have to either go through the throttle body or take off a sensor and stick it in the hole where that sensor once was when people find out that they have carbon buildup on their intake valves they understand they are looking for a cheap and easy fix we some time ago made a video actually testing a cheap and easy fix where you spray a chemical down the intake which is supposed to remove the carbon while the engine is running and get rid of it we showed before and then we showed after that service to show how good of a fix that would be it wasn't a good fix that's the car we're gonna be cleaning later in this video and the stuff that's on the valves is really gooey and thick and doesn't come off real easy and the chemical just passing by it is not strong enough to actually remove it nor would you want all that falling in your engine at one time anyway this issue is commonly found across a wide spectrum of Manufacturers like BMW Mercedes Hyundai Volkswagen Audi and even Honda in the Volkswagen Audi world that we specialize in this has been a common problem for some time but it's important to note that some engines have this problem and some of the newer engines do not have this problem if you have a Volkswagen Rowdy with a 2.0 T FSI engine or a 2.0 TSI engine this would have been from around 2006 to around 2014-ish these engines will have that issue and something that needs to be addressed every 60 to 70 000 miles if you have a 1.8 turbo or 2.0 Turbo gen 3 engine found from about 2015 and later these engines do not have carbon buildup issues and it's very uncommon to fine build up at all on those cars Additionally the oil and fuel equality in your car have a big impact on the carbon buildup that can happen this is a gen 3 engine again not common to have carbon buildup with 146 000 miles this car was impeccably maintained and the carbon buildup on this engine at that high mileage is barely there at all so let's look at a car that was not well maintained this is a gen 3 1.8 T engine again not common to have carbon buildup issues this car was purchased by Nathan our video guy and it had 70 000 miles at the time of purchase the Carfax said it was from a rural area and it seemed like it had missed some oil changes and likely they use exceptionally low quality oil and extended those oil changes far too long you can see this golf 1.8 T Engine with 80 000 miles is worse than a Mark 7 GTI that was well maintained with 146 000 miles it's worth noting that Nathan's car now it has 120 000 miles and you can see the Delta between the carbon buildup of those is not significant and that is because he uses good quality fuel 93 octane because he's tuned and he uses the liquid mind oil at shopnap.com buy it they're sponsoring a bill that's coming soon it's top secret but it's gonna be pretty dope now let's talk about additional preventative options first let's cut it out with the Italian tune-up stuff an Italian tune-up is the idea that revving the living out of your engine like a teenager who just got his license will prevent carbon from building up on your valves if you believe that you probably also believe that a Naruto run during the rainstorm will prevent you from getting wet as we showed with our previous video introducing chemicals into your intake are not a fix once the carbon has built up they are however a possible preventative so things like seafoam or that Berryman product we use in that can be something you use every 15 or 20 000 miles maybe to try to make sure that carbon does not build up over time don't go running one of those Services through your engine every oil change you'll probably end up killing your cat a catch can is something that can help slow carbon buildup on your intake valves it does this by removing deposits that are coming through your PCV system before they get sent back into your intake to be burned this is unlikely to be a permanent fix for your issue shoe and it will likely only slow things down in addition to that it introduces a new issue of having to maintain your catch can and drain it every so often and let's be honest most people including myself are either too busy or too lazy to maintain their car in general so adding another thing to maintain probably not a great idea and other people mentioned water methanol as a possible solution this is designed for engine performance and the kits cost around 500 bucks and they're a lot of work to install to me it makes no sense to buy a kit it's 500 bucks then pay somebody a lot of money to install that costs more to install than the fixing this problem that you're trying to solve in the first place the only real way to fix this problem is by manually scraping and or blasting the valves now to do that you want to take the intake manifold off your car for the Volkswagen Audi world we have a DIY on the TSI intake manifold that we did with our friend Charles the home mechanic of almost a decade ago now it's very old and much less gray here I also made a water pump video on Nathan's car which I showed removing the intake manifold there so we have a TSI and an mqb DIY for both intake manifold removals now if you don't want to do any of those things because you're lazy or your hands are made of hams our shops can do them for you both in our North Carolina location as well as our Ohio location we'll link to our shop site where you can schedule an appointment in the description below in addition to that we've put together some kits with the chemicals scrapers for doing this job for those cars including the gaskets so just to remove the intake manifold for this car so we can do an inspection for the carbon cleaning here are four cylinders and here's cylinder one with a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it and here is still under one when we documented it previously with around 80 000 miles on it here's cylinder 2 with 120 here's cylinder 2 with 80. here's cylinder three with 120 here's cylinder three with 80. here's cylinder four with 120 000 miles and here's cylinder 4 with 80 000 miles there are a lot of methods for cleaving carbon off of intake valves the guys at our shop use this valve clean before they do carbon cleaning because it makes the carbon come off the valves way easier regardless of what method you're using because there are four cylinders we're going to try four different methods to show you different ways you can do this so cylinder one and two are both going to be media blasted the only difference is going to be so under two is going to get valve clean soaked cylinder one is not we're going in dry cylinder three we're going to pour our valve clean in and then we're going to scrape it with picks and brushes to try to get it as clean as possible and cylinder four we're going to soak with valve clean and then use the zip tie method to clean that off so these are in all of your cylinders they need to be pulled out and cleaned Justin used a method of razor blade wire brush then he brake cleans the rest of everything off until they look nice and fancy like this you have to turn your engine to make sure the valves are all closed across the engine now in our particular instance three cylinders are closed cylinder one is currently open so what you do is you take a socket like this 24 millimeter we'll link to it you put it on the crank right here and then you rotate it around clockwise until you get the valves all the way closed on the cylinders you're working with well after the guys let the valve clean soak they scrape manually to kind of break as much as they can up regardless of whether they're doing it manually or with a media Blaster so let's go straight down work the way around in a circle in the circles like that just off the sides on the second hole do the same thing so the way Justin cleans the carpet on this is he goes around the lower valve seat with a straight pick and then he uses the hook pick to go up and down the shafts of the valve and then clean the upper part where it goes into the head you have to be careful with the valve seal up top so the guys at the shop use these long picks I also did test with these shorter picks they will reach but it's not nearly as good as the long picks we offer a version of short picks like this you may want to try to look in to get some long picks if you really want it to be exactly perfect now that Justin knocked the major carbon off those valves we're going to suck out the valve clean and those big carbon bits and we're going to use the media Blaster to get it perfectly clean in this case we're going to be using baking soda other people are going to use Walnut blasting either way Media Blasting is what we use in our shop because it's the best way to get the best results possible and the cleanest actual engine here we have the media blasting results in cylinder one you can see here's the before and after we did not soak this cylinder with valve clean here are the results for cylinder two we did soak the cylinder with valve clean then we media blast it and as you can see this looks exactly how it would have come off the factory line absolutely perfect and this is the best method for cleaning valves on your engine one of the things that they told me from the shop was that it's going to be about a similar amount of time and similar results with and without valve clean when you're actually media blasting the major valve clean differences sometimes it will be easier to scrape the stuff off and kind of get the bulk of it off as opposed to Media blast afterwards now we're going to clean cylinder 3 with picks so this will do with our other cylinder we're going to break up the carbon the major carbon with this pick and then we're going to suck out the valve clean and that big carbon once we get that sucked out to make this properly clean we need to use now brake clean and continue to scrape to get all of that extra stuff off so we're going to be braking scraping sucking out brake cleaning scraping sucking out rinse and repeat until it's clean to your liking and as we look it's actually quite a bit cleaner but there's still kind of some chunks and some spots that we got to get get out of there so you're into a brake clean picks until you've gotten everything off that you're happy with and then here's the end result wow take a look at all that pick work so the people on the internet say to use zip ties as a hack so we're going to find out today hack or whack so we take a drill put the zip ties in the drill and then we spin around inside the cylinder clean it up that's the theory I don't know I'm going to cut them right here because that seems about right for me that's I I should have held the other side this is the side that should be on the floor because I'm not using it instead of me having to pick up all those pieces and put them inside so we stick them in the drill tighten our drill down theory is you stick it in there and you spin around like that and it cleans them out I have no idea that's gonna work at all so here is our before we zip it up again you can't really do a lot of harm here because it's all metal so it's like as long as you know gaining up into that valve seat not a lot of harm you can do here as long as you don't go like a complete maniac I'm losing Zippy's left him right here they're just hanging around inside there I'm gonna clean it out with brake clean and we're gonna reassess how good our first zip went my assessment of the zip method is I would say it's pretty good hack I would call it a hack not whack cuts down the time and the scraping you got to do and how like much you have to pay attention you kind of just stick it in there and you know Zing it around get it move it around a bunch of places it's not perfect you probably have to do some scraping still manually but but remember we did use that valve clean first which helps soften all of this and we scraped off the major chunks beforehand I thought cutting these shorter was actually going to be better because that wouldn't like spread out when you start the drill I think it's actually probably better if you cut them a little longer so you can get deeper in there and not have the drill kind of all up in the cylinder head you have a little bit more to work with in terms of angles so to recap our cleaning you can see cylinder one and two where we media blast much cleaner looking looks perfect so under three and four not perfect but the major obstruction all the major material is removed you're going to gain fuel mileage you're going to get better performance you're going to get rid of those cold start misfires it's still going to solve your problem is it as good looking as the other cylinders no is it good enough that I think it's just as good pretty much so if you're not up for this task you can take it to one of our shops or a Volkswagen Audi specialty shop like ours if you want to DIY it we have those kits available which we will link to in the description below we also have those videos that will allow you to do it yourself but you know good luck with that [Music]

Channel: Deutsche Auto Parts

Views: 1,826,401

Keywords: carbon cleaning, 2.0t carbon, how to clean carbon easy, easy carbon fix, tsi mk6, mk7 gti

Id: LTV-uHv5Cwk

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023