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