rev up your engines, today I'm going to
explain the truth about carbon cleaning your engine, now as I showed in previous
videos, it really doesn't matter if the outside of your engine is dirty, but it's
important that the inside of your engine is clean, so of course you want to change
your oil regularly to keep the engine clean that way, but realize that when
gasoline burns in Earth's atmosphere inside your engine, that one of the
byproducts is carbon, and carbon can take up space inside your engine, if you get a
lot of carbon buildup inside the combustion chamber, the carbon takes up
space, that space will make the compression ratio go higher, because you
have less space in the same area it'll make the compression higher compression,
it can lead to pre-ignition your engine clanging when you're driving around, it's
not a good thing, now in conventional gasoline engine like this Toyota Matrix,
the fuel injectors are on the intake so when the air gets sucked into the engine,
the fuel injectors spray gasoline with that and they go over the intake valves
as they're sucked in, and if you know anything about gasoline it's very good
solvent, it's a very good cleaner, so you generally don't get much carbon buildup
on the valves of a conventional engine if you use good gasoline and change your
oil regularly, but if you have one of these modern GDI gasoline direct
injection systems, an older Volkswagen with one, they're notorious for carboning
up the engine, because the GDI injectors are
directly spraying fuel into the block, they don't spray it over the intake
valves, and with all this anti-pollution equipment, the PCV system can take oil
deposits and stuff out of the engine and burns it, but since it's no longer mixed
with gasoline when it goes over the intake, it can build up carbon on the
intake system, I guess you could say they should have seen it coming when you're
talking about the Volkswagen engineers, but alas they didn't see it coming
I've seen Volkswagen engines that were so carboned up that you had to take the
intake off and you had to get a sandblasting machine and instead of
putting sand in it, you would put walnut shells because
they're softer, and you would actually have to bless the carbon off the inside
of the engine, now some of the really modern engines that have GDI, like some
of the Toyotas, they actually have a GDI system and then they also have the
regular fuel system on the intake system and the computer alternates back and
forth, so the regular injectors on the intake spray gasoline over the intake
valves to help clean them, and those engine hey don't have a problem with
them carboning up, as long as you use good gasoline and change the oil
regularly, I see a lot of people are trying to sell carbon cleaning to their
customers, they went out they bought a machine, they want to pay for the machine
and make a profit, so they try to tell everybody, Oh your engine needs carbon
cleaning, we got a carbon clean your engine, and many times that's not the
case, they don't need carbon cleaning, now if
you want to see if your engine needs carbon cleaning, you can use one of these
borescopes and look inside your engine, I like this one cuz it's a standalone unit
but I've even bought 14 dollar ones on eBay that hookup to either your laptop
or your phone and they work perfectly fine
too, so they don't cause much anymore we'll just take off the beauty cover,
and take off this ignition coil, out it comes, and remove the spark plug, then we
get the scope and look inside, and as we can see inside here, this thing is pretty
clean there's no clumps of carbon lying around, which doesn't surprise me at all
in this matrix engine, hey we don't drive drive it that much, I change the oil every
3,000 miles and use a high quality synthetic oil and
use good gasoline, and both my wife and I are pretty fast driver so we keep the
engine revved up which helps clean it out yeah engines can carbon up if you don't go
over 30 miles an hour, that's where the supposed myth of the Italian tune up
actually does work quite well in cars that are driven too slow, the Italian
tune up being the slang for, getting on a highway driving your car real fast, my wife
used to have a camry station wagon and she drove it three miles a day back
and forth to work in city traffic, one time we took it to San
Antonio which takes about four hours to drive and the speed limit
someof the way was 75-80 miles an hour, and when
we got back boy that thing ran even better, it ran okay before but it idled
better smoother had more acceleration cuz that help clean the carbon out of
the engine from it going too slow all the time, but let's say you looked inside
you saw a whole bunch of carbon and you need to clean your engine out, maybe you
bought a used car, maybe it goes too slow, there are lots of carbon cleaning
systems out there, but only a few of them are actually safe, now one is using water
what's water do when it gets really hot it turns to steam, steam cleaning can clean
things really well, now it actually can work but it has one main disadvantage, if
your tempted to do it yourself by spraying it in or just pouring it in the
engine, you get too much water in you can hide or lock the engine and bend the
Pistons and do all kinds of damage, now professional mechanics have water
cleaning machines takes about 40 minutes to do, you pay the mechanic to do it he
has a machine that's setup for that but it doesn't do any damage it's a
relatively complicated procedure it's not just sitting there guessing
spraying or pouring water in the intake back in World War 2 some
fighter planes they had a system that if they were being attacked and they had to
try to get away as fast as possible, they could actually inject coolant of the
engine right into the engine, because not only does it clean but of course it
gives a boost of power hydrogen h2o oxygen, you get more power that way, it's
not something you're going to do all the time sometimes the engines would blow up, but
I guess if someone's behind you with 50 caliber machine guns blast away, you
really don't think about damaging the engine that much
the thing that seems to do the best cleaning that
I tried out is ats chemical one, the 3c induction cleaner, it hooks up to the
induction and what it does is there's a microprocessor and it has time to
release of chemicals that they've created to clean all the different parts and do
it correctly without damaging the engine now I remember a
while back when Ford came out with their GDIs and they were having carboning up problems,
Ford put out a note that said, do not use these carbon cleaning
chemicals, because if you do chunks might come off and if you have a turbocharger
it can break the turbocharger, if you have big enough chunks it could clog up the
catalytic converter, they were saying not to use these cleaners, but this system
works differently, it took these guys years to figure this out, out of Albuquerque New
Mexico, I guess there's nothing else to do in Albuquerque, so you might as well
invent something, modern fuels and additives and oils and their additives, so
having a new system with special chemicals run by a microprocessor it
only makes sense to me, so as far as I'm concerned the ats cleaner seems to do
the best job of any of them out there but as I said before, you have to decide
hey do you really need your engine carbon cleaned in the first place, of
course you can test it like I showed with the borescope, if you got an older
Volkswagen with the older GDI system, I definitely would advise having that done
every once in a while because they have a problem with building up, but if you
have a normal non GDI engine and you drive at normal highway speeds a lot, you
probably don't need any cleaning, but if you drive like a turtle or let's say you
just bought a used car from an estate from an old person that hardly drove at
all, and maybe it has 15,000 miles and it's 18 years old, probably be a good
idea to have some carbon cleaning done to that, but don't be misled by the promises
of your cars going to run better, it's going to have more performance, it's
going to get better gas mileage, if your car runs perfectly fine now, you really don't
need a carbon cleaned, because modern gasoline configuration they keep
perfecting it, it burns much better than gasoline when I was a kid, when my
grandfather was a young mechanic those Model T Fords would carbon up all
the time, practically every winter you'd have to tear the engine apart, clean the
carbon off the valves and pistons and put it back together again, those days
are long gone, and since the fuel injector systems are run by computers as
as is the ignition modern cars are much more efficient,
you're not gonna have the build-up of carbon as much because of that reason,
but whatever you do, don't just get a jug of water and start pouring it down the
throttle in the engine, you can just and engine doing that I've seen that
happen, and please don't go to one of those car washes and use one of their
wands that has the high-pressure steam and do it, totally unregulated and you'll
probably destroy your engine if you start spraying that inside, so now you know
the truth about carbon cleaning your engine, and realize for most people most
of the time, it's an unnecessary process the car just does need, because
unfortunately carbon cleaning that's become like some of the snake oil
products where people say, add this to your engine oil then it'll run better
and rebuild your engine while you drive it's all a bunch of nonsense too, the
additives in oil are fine, the additives in modern gasoline are also fine, for
normal driving you don't have to mess around with carbon cleaning, but if you
are a worrywart hey pull out a spark plug or two, look inside with a borescope,
if it's clean inside ha peace of mind knowing yeah you don't have to do
anything, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos,
remember to ring that Bell
