Keep Your Engine Running FOREVER With This EASY 5 Step "Checkup" (do this once a year)

[Music] what's up guys welcome back to the channel if you own or have owned a vehicle with over a hundred thousand miles hit that thumbs up button and tell me down in the comments what exactly that car is with that in mind i'm the kind of individual that when i buy cars i keep them for a long time my truck that i have that's my daily driver i have had for almost eight years i've put over 100 000 miles on it my bmw right here is a 1999 i've also had this car for a long time so i buy them i take really good care of them i pay them off and i keep them forever now for people like me or for people who just don't want to end up paying big expenses and repairs taking good care of your vehicle year after year is what's going to be most important to you so that you're going to have a good experience today i'm going to tell you what the top five things are that i do on an annual basis once a year at least that will keep your vehicle running for as long as possible sort of like a checkup where you go into the doctor not really a lot of big things done but the things that you do consistently to keep yourself from having to have things like heart surgery stuff that you don't want to have happen but if you do these little things year after year you keep yourself from getting to that point that's the point of today's video [Music] diving right into it one of the big things that i do probably more than just an annual basis is using a product like sea foam or even marvel mystery oil i'd say the vast majority of people have at least heard of sea foam or marble mystery oil you may not really know how to use it there are basically three main ways that you can use a product like sea foam or marvel mystery oil to give your engine a complete engine treatment and if you are going to use them you're going to want to do all three i went into pretty deep detail in a video i've made before if you haven't seen it click up here but it's basically going to give you the steps to how to use this product in all three ways to really give you a full cleaning you can use those products to do things like clean your fuel injectors so they're giving a nice solid spray you can use it in a different way that will clean all of your intake manifolds your intake valves your combustion chamber and then you can use it another way as well that can do things like clean even the bottom end your crankcase sludge that might be in your engine it's just a really good thing to do i have had awesome results when i've had kind of a rough idle or rough running engine i've used it before it's really done a great job i've seen it improve my fuel economy given me just a smoother running engine overall and i can tell you that the dirtiest i have ever seen oil is when i use marvel mystery oil in my crank case then the oil change and oh my gosh i can tell you from experience it really does a good job cleaning out an old dirty engine so that is why using sea foam or marvel mystery oil is number one on my to-do list for your annual checkup [Music] moving on to number two a while ago i made a video on how to make a smoke tester for i think it was under 10 bucks or something a smoke test is something that you can do to find any sort of vacuum leaks or even boost leaks if you can make enough pressure and vacuum leaks let me tell you they plague all their vehicles that's because rubber lines plastic lines all kinds of stuff on your vehicle even seals as your car ages if you're keeping it for a while or just if it gets older that stuff just from all the heat from the engine and just from time alone corrodes cracks breaks down and causes these little vacuum leaks that can be really anywhere in the engine and they can really suck to find but having a smoke machine makes it so much easier to find it a big reason why you want to make sure that you don't have any vacuum leaks is they can cause the engine to run particularly rough at idle they can even cause lean conditions which can cause pinging i mean you can see why you wouldn't want to have one now i've already made a video about how to make this 10 smoke test machine but let me tell you while it is cheap and can save you in a pinch it's a pain to use time after time and honestly uh you can see why it might be a little dangerous so i picked myself up one of these smoke diagnostic leak detectors from autumnal and i got this right off of amazon it's a really good price having a smoke machine like that makes it so much easier to do and because i do it so often on all my vehicles just to check on them it's been a pretty valuable thing for me to have so i highly recommend if you're going to be doing this on a more than just one time i guess that you get yourself a machine like this first of all i like that it came with this cool handle easy to carry and transport it has a three year warranty and as you can see it's just much more of a complete system to make it easy to use on really any car as complicated as all this might look it comes with a fancy little letter when you open it up is your user manual compared to a lot of the smoke machines you can find online this one is definitely one of the more reasonably priced ones especially how full-featured it comes it can be virtually impossible to find these leaks especially because a lot of hoses are underneath stuff where you can't see or behind things that you could never reach so you have to be able to find these leaks visually and the smoke does that for you just connect the hose you want to use cinch it down add about 20 milliliters of the fluid you want to use this is baby oil connect yourself up to a power source we got two options here just air or if we want smoke i want the smoke now what i noticed about this that's way better than the little tiny one that i made is it pretty much just starts generating smoke right away you can see right here dang that's way faster so because of just how hard it can be to really find a vacuum leak without the right tools and because of how detrimental it can be to how well your engine runs or lasts we want to be able to find it easy and i'm going to show you just how easy it is to find one when you have the right tools i just turned that sucker on [Applause] [Music] and right away you can see i caused the leak to come out of there i opened up the cap it's not leaking right now but you can see how much easier it would be to find a leak because the smoke helps you find exactly where it's coming from and there's no guessing holy you could hook it up somewhere in your pcb system like i did you could use one of these plugs that it comes with and hook it up to your intake and it's going to put pressure in everything in here and even if there's a tiny little cracked hose way underneath somewhere you can't see you'll start to see smoke rising out of it and know exactly where it came from it's going to save you a lot of time it's going to save you a lot of money especially because most shops are going to charge you at least 100 bucks most likely 200 or more to do a vacuum leak test for you and not even fix the problem just to find out where it's coming from and to make it easy for you guys to find anything that i'm going to use in this video all the products are made linked down in the description direct links that take you right to the product in case you want to try it out for yourself so we have seafoam and marvel mystery oil type of product for number one smoke test for number two what's number three now that the shop stinks like burnt baby oil and there's a haze in here like i'm doing something the government doesn't want me to do number three is going to be an oil test from blackstone labs just speaking to how important preventative maintenance can be in catching a problem early as far as saving you a bunch of money and headache let's talk about a bmw that has a particular type of problem the s85 has rod bearing issues and what happens when those things get worn down you end up spinning a bearing and you can imagine how expensive it can be to replace a v10 engine getting an oil analysis from blackstone labs what they're going to do is take your oil that you sent them do a massive analysis on it checking all kinds of levels for how healthy the oil is contaminants in the oil other metal particles and things that you can't see that they can detect and tell you basically what the health of your engine is you could even tell them what you're mainly concerned about and they can look for that problem and either help you catch something early and fix it or give yourself peace of mind and let you know that what you're driving is going to last for a long time and keep doing what you're doing so in the instance of an s85 they could do an oil analysis and tell you that there's a lot of copper or whatever kind of materials are going to be in those worn out bearings and say hey look at these high levels you might want to change your rod bearings before your engine blows up that can save you a lot of money because it's much cheaper to do a repair like that than having to buy a new engine obviously blackstone will send you one of these things for free and i think it's like 30 bucks to get an analysis done a really cheap way of giving yourself some insurance and catching a problem before it ever becomes a problem to give you an idea just how extensive these tests are i'm going to show you one that just came back for me about a couple weeks ago on the truck that i had parked outside with almost 165 000 miles on it i have a tiny little bit of coolant leaking from my radiator cap but i was seeing the reservoir go lower and lower the main thing that i wanted to know was is there any excess of metals meaning the engine being worn out or is there any bit of coolant in my engine meaning that it could be the head gasket i just wanted to know if it was leaking from somewhere internally as well here's how my came back gavin this is an excellent for support for the colorado wear metals mostly aluminum through tin are low compared to universal averages these levels aren't concerning in the least they show a healthy engine free mechanical issues and excessive wear the oil itself also tested well physically as no contamination from water was found and the flash point was high enough to rule out measurable fuel dilution we're confident that this will be the first of many clean reports from this chevy i personally really like that they give you that touch that there's someone actually typing out an analysis and not just giving you a bunch of numbers to try to decipher yourself and as you do it over and over these columns will keep filling up and you can compare whether you're using different oils to see what works better longer oil change intervals or just seeing as where starts to become a problem or stays consistent and if you've been a viewer of my channel for really any amount of time you'll know that i do not baby my vehicles i drive this car like i stole it i use my truck like a tool and i'm convinced that the reason that my oil analysis come back so clean on both of my vehicles is because i do really good maintenance and maybe even because of these five steps that i do moving on to number four of five we need to understand something very picky that most modern engines run off of and as a key contributor to how well your engine is gonna run how good your fuel economy is gonna be engine health really overall that part that i'm talking about is right here a mass airflow sensor you'll find this somewhere after your air filter but before it actually goes into your throttle body what it does is measure how much air is going into your engine there's a tiny little filament in there that will measure how much air is going through the engine communicate that to your car and let it know how much fuel in relation to the air it needs to be putting in to run well this tiny little filament in there can be particularly picky when it comes to measuring the air going through the intake if it's just a little bit dirty if there's a little bit of oil or some sort of contamination from the filter something got past the filter or it's just old it can cause your engine to run pretty badly and it can't be kind of difficult to diagnose and a lot of people end up spending a bunch of money trying to fix that problem when you can just use something like this to prevent it from happening in the first place it's a lot easier to do preventative maintenance than have to get into the maintenance itself and it's usually cheaper too so let me show you how to use something like this to clean your mass airflow sensor annually and keep your engine running smooth just spray some of it on that filament in there get it all nice and clean let this sucker dry and then you're good to go having a dirty mass airflow sensor can give you check engine lights it can cause your engine to run lean because it's reading less air than is actually going in it because it's dirty that can lead to you to think that there's other problems like vacuum leaks or a clogged injector or something when it just could have been solved in the first place by you just annually cleaning your mass airflow sensor everybody knows that to have a clean well-running engine you need to have good fuel you need to have good air you need to have a solid spark that's kind of why i've created the system that i have because it takes care of all three well we've taken care of the fuel we've taken care of the air now it's time to take care of the spark [Music] this right here is a coil pack from my chevy truck outside what's connected to the bottom of here once it's installed into the engine is a spark plug spark plug is something that you could consider kind of like a wearable part over time the the diode on the end wears down the gap gets bigger the plug gets fouled it's just something that you want to change consistently to keep a strong running engine a lot of manufacturers will say just to change it every 40 000 miles every 50 every 60 000 miles or more i just take care of it once a year my spark plugs are always really clean if i ever do pull them out and they look awesome i might put them back in but spark plugs are cheap it's just something that you can take out and inspect at least and if it looks like it might need replacement or might need to get re-gapped something easy that you can do throw those suckers back in and then you're good to go what's really great about inspecting your spark plugs is they can tell you a lot about how well your engine's running if they're dark black covered in carbon you know that they're probably fouled out and your end is running too rich there's just something not good going on there if you take them out and they're greasy and wet all covered in oil you know there's oil getting into your combustion chamber one way or another or on the opposite end of the spectrum if it's running really lean which can be super bad it can have little bumps all over it show signs of even burning or if your engine hopefully is running well you'll just take it out they'll be a little gray nice and clean and you know you're good to go you might think that you could escape having any of these problems at all just by having a generally newer vehicle and not something older like these but what i've experienced and what a lot of people i know have experienced is you really have these problems even more frequently with newer cars because of their tighter emissions controls and more complicated emission systems and because of things like direct injection there's just a lot of things that newer vehicles have that make them more complicated which means more problems so while you might think that a video like this is just relevant for you guys who are driving older vehicles like this that have higher mileage but it's also just as relevant for you guys driving newer vehicles that are more and more complicated that just want to keep these things problem free while you own it and that pretty much sums it up those are the five steps that i do at least annually to keep my cars running in tip-top shape for a long time if you guys enjoyed today's video give it a big thumbs up and if you're not subscribed hit that freaking subscribe button and don't forget the notification bell and i'll see you in the next one if you've been a subscriber of the channel you'll know that i'm pretty dang hard on all of my vehicles so if someone's gonna have a problem it probably should be me i probably shouldn't have said that

Channel: Treats On The Streets

Views: 34,465

Keywords: e36, m3, e36 m3, bmw, reliable, reliability, how to, 325i, 328i, 318ti, 323ci, lowered, coilovers, race, track, drift, build, repairs, vanos, cooling, intake, exhaust, e46, 330ci, check engine, fix car, smoke test, seafoam, marvel mystery oil, mass air flow cleaner, oil test, high miles, chevrolet, truck

Id: LbAyhbeukdo

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021