You may think that when you burn gasoline, that it cleans your engine. But in reality, it may not. It actually dirties the inside of your engine. Now, there are a lot of spots inside of an engine that get gummed-up with carbon and various other things that are the result of burning fuels and vapors from the crank case. The tops of pistons, the backs of intake valves, the combustion chambers, inside the intake manifold, the throttle body itself... all of these areas in an engine get dirty as you drive it.
Now, we found some really severe carbon deposits on the tops of the pistons, and in the combustion chambers, and so on, of this Toyota. Now, we had some choices. We could do individual cleaning processes which would have made them absolutely spotless, but would have been expensive for the customers. So we elected to do one combination cleaning. Now for that, we use this pressurized canister. We put a special cleaning chemical in it, that softens and cleans away carbon and other harsh deposits like that; it has a hose on it; the hose gets connected to this nozzle, that we have here, and we use shop air to pressurize that vessel.
Now, the nozzle, the spray nozzle, goes into the throttle body of the engine, and we run the engine with this chemical being misted into the throttle body. That cleans the throttle body; it cleans the intake manifold, which is important on a lot of cars because they have butterflies in there, that change the length of the intake runners to match the throttle setting. They don't work? Well, you have poor performance. And you may get a check engine light.
But then, this chemical continues on over the backs of the intake valves; cleans them; cleans the combustion chamber and the tops of the pistons.
Alright, so one-shot job that does everything, and does a very good job. So we can see in our before-and-after pictures of this very car. After, the piston is almost spotless. Before, it was completely coated with carbon. So, if your car has some miles on it, 30,000 or more, this is a process that you might want to consider. It'll probably pay for itself in improved performance, and possibly even fuel economy. And if you have a question or a comment, drop me a line, right here, at MotorWeek.