legacycentral bbs

Last week my car started ticking... I changed the oil... still ticking. Fearing the worst I started looking in autotrader for a new car. Until... A friend of mine suggested this trick:

Take a glass of water (tap water will work) and just pick a vaccum hose that you can unplug from a solenoid or something...Just something that goes directly into the intake manifold. Just pick a hose that has enough length on it to stick it into a cup.

Just start the car up. Pull off this hose....Get a buddy to keep the car at a high idle. just slowly dip the vacuum hose into the cup of water, and allow the engine to suck it up....Your car will start billowing lots of white smoke.. but don't worry, it's just the water. Once the cup or water is gone...plug the hose back on, and go for a drive. After driving the car around alot.. it should clear up.

It's actually a trick that people have used for years. People also use Marvels Mystery Oil. Back before we had EFI you would just take off the air cleaner and slowly pour the water or Marvels Mystery Oil down the carb. Cleans up alot of the carbon, and especially with hydraulic lifters it does wonders.



After effects are not immdiate.. drive it around for a bit, preferably a decent trip on the highway to let things get cleared out. My results are as follows: Better pull under accell ( I think it cleared some crap outta my hoses for boost control), smoother idle, easier start and no more ticking of the lifters!!!!!!

Post your results here if you want.

I have been wanting to do this to help get rid of carbon build up.

Only issue I have with this is that if done improperly you can hydro lock the motor since water is incompressible.

It's best to use a spray......however the water may mist and break up when it's in the manifold.......I'm not sure......


thoughts....comments??

Water injection will keep the combustion chamber remarkably clean of carbon and other deposits. It will also lower the charge temperature through evaporation and a mist or spray is prefered. You should be sure to make sure that the system you make or buy has safeguards to prevent water from being dumped or leaking into the engine, this has happened where these precautions have not been taken. This idea goes back to WWII or possibly farther. At that time there was a gas shortage and rationing was in effect so everything that would burn was dumped into gas tanks, fuel oil, white gas, diesel fuel, kerosene ect. Some of these fuels would build up deposits it bad that they would raise the compression ratio so high and foul plugs so bad the engines could not be started or run properly. So it was watering time in the carburator.
Al(CO)

Al,

Do you have any suggestions for making something that either fits over/in a larger vacuum line to provide a mist?

Hmmmm, interesting, as for your compression concern, Josh, wouldn't you need a whole bunch of water to fill up the entire combustion chamber and therefore worry about compressing it?

Could you put some pantyhose over the vacuum line and stick the water supply close to the hose but not the hose in the water itself?

Most of the ones that I have seen have a small nozzel that give a spray a tank and some sort control solenoid that starts the spray after the engine gets up to speed. supposedly this will even give a little better gas milage kind of a poor mans hydrogen powered car ? I bet that some of the aftermarket equipment people have something and probably pretty reasonable as there isn't very much to it.

The world war II fighter and bomber mechanics are credited to starting the whole engine cleaning with water. So is water injection along with water/methanol injection for war emergency power. It's not as recent as people think.

Mark,

I thought that was about the time Mark (see above post) I can remember people doing this and have wondered just how this cleaning works. I have heard several explanations and they were all different. I may want to try this if my plans to move to Europe work out. I was there a long time ago and hope the quality of fuel has gone up. I had a rather tired ex-army chevy 6cyl staff car at that time and even it had problems with the fuel.
AL(CO)
al@iwtu.net

Well, I'll try this as soon as parts for my makeshift intercooler watersray arrive. I figure that with the fan style sprayer hooked up to a vaccuum line it SHOULD turn the water into enough of an aerosol to not be detrimental to the engine . . .

Everything should be here next week so I'll let you guys know.

Okay, I'm gonna bring this back up again. The Toyota dealer that I work at has this stuff called Top Engine Cleaner. It is sent into the engine via the brake booster vacuum hose. What a mechanic told me it does, specifically, is it coats the combustion chamber, causing overcompression. This breaks all the carbon deposits loose and sends them out the tailpipe in one smelly, ugly cloud. It sounds to me like this is an even better idea than the water trick...

I've used it on my car before, and found it to run slightly better. I have a slight ticking now, and I might try it again tonight and post the results...

Let us know how it turns out........how much does the stuff cost? Have you tried the water method?

I have used and recommend the General Motors Top End Cleaner, this stuff is supposed to be the best and you can get it from any GM dealership. Have also used stuff called Sea Foam, should be able to get it at any parts store, comparable to the GM. Used them both on my 87 GL 1.8, knocked like a sob when it wanted to and had 287k on the motor when I parked it, with great sucess and also on my Legacy with noticable differences.

I just gave my car a nice tall glass of water.

Actually, after all was done it was a LITER of water

I had done this previously on a couple carburated vehicles, but I never got as good results as today.

So some of you may remember me posting about bad hydrolic adjusters. Well, so far after a "spirited" test drive the knock/click I had is gone! I thought maybe it would diminish but this is a great difference.

I knew that water was helpful, but I guess the design of the subaru engine just leads to more crap build up because this was the best free mod I have ever done! (except the free auto window up mod you can make on mkiii supras).

Ciper,

What were the exact steps you did to do this.

Give me a step-by-step instructions for the guy who doesn't want to fark up his motor by hydro-locking it.

I want to do this, and I am prettty sure the results will be good....I'm just a little weary about it.

Also.....yeah subie motors are carbon pigs.

Okay, this would be easier with two people. Ill give short instructions.

Drive the car around so its at stable operating temp (after fans come one)

Have a small cup of water handy and a container to fill the small cup back up


Disconnect the vacuum line from the purge valve. At idle this wont have any suction.

Place the line into the cup of water

As soon as you open the throttle plate it will start sucking. The water will cause the car to bog down, I kept it at about 4k rpm.

I had mine drink about 1/2 cup of water at a time. I then keep the RPM high but cover the vacuum with my finger.

You can tell when the water has left the intake as it takes less and less throttle to keep the RPM high. I kept the RPM at the high level for 10 seconds after it came back to normal/stable.

I let the car idle for about 30 seconds and inserted the tube to a refilled cup.

Repeat.

At first I was scared because my car sounded really weird. I took it for a 5 minute test drive (cruising and wot). After coming back and parking the engine noise was gone, I could clearly hear the ticking of the injectors now!

Purge valve? I'm not an idiot around the engine... but I would have to look that one up... can you give some visual clues to which one to pull? Maybe a circle on a photo... every person I know that has a shop around here has no idea about doing this water ingestion on a fuel-injected vehicle. *shrug*

I guess i could always check the trusty owner's manual and find that valve (if it wasn't outside in the cold)

Brat, lemme answer your question 1st, then tell of my experience...

The easiest thing to do would be to locate the tiny vacuum hose attached to the right (passenger) side of your throttle body, follow it down to the purge valve located underneath the passenger side of the intake manifold. Pull the hose off of this valve to perform the procedure...

Now, I did the engine cleaner tonight, and allow me to say I'm disappointed with the results and worried about my timing belt work. The engine did not suck on the cleaner very hard and left some in the bottle, not good. Also, since the engine bogs down upon receiving this solution, I revved it up several times and a couple times after quick throttle blips and higher RPMs the car would backfire slightly. This sounds to me (low vacuum, backfiring) like I have the timing off... , does this sound right to anybody else, I understand this is a special situation in which the engine is not operating normally.

There was no smoke, but it still smelled. I'm not sure if this means I really didn't have much carbon buildup, or the engine wasn't sucking hard enough to make full use of the solution...

BTW when I took off my exhaust manifold to do the motor mounts, I looked up into the head and the exhaust ports looked pretty black and nasty, which is carbon deposits, right?

After performing this procedure, I drove home under several conditions: WOT and cruising. Now I will say than when I got home, the ticking seemed to have stopped, I think. I'm not 100% sure, I might try the water trick anyway...

Oh, I really hope I didn't screw up the timing, I don't want to take time to fix it back when I could be on Spring Break at the beach with T&A all over the place ...

ciper,

Excellant instructions!! I never thought about that damn vacuum line at the TB. That is an excellant place to do it too. Centrally located in the intake manifold, small enough line so the water doesn't go pouring in.

So you put in about a liter of water....or something like that?

Brat,

The purge solenoid valve is under the passenger side intake runner. It has a small vacuum line running to the top of the throttle body. You can see where the line goes on this pic. It's the L shaped tube on the top of the TB

http://www.main.experiencetherave.com:8 ... p_1511.jpg

huh... maybe I'll give this a shot. a little extra cleaning never hurt, and I doubt it could suck enough through that tiny hose to hydro-lock the engine .

I tried this just a little bit ago. She's still running . She felt a little peppier, but you know how sensetive butt dynos are after tuning or modding a car in any way.

I used one of those .5 litre bottles of spring water since I didn't have a cup handy. I used that vacuum point on the TB. I used a different hose tho. the purge valve hose that's connected to the TB looked difficult to put back on the valve solenoid. I was too wimpy to let it just fullbore suck water outa the cup. instead I let it trickle so it was going at like half the rate. It sucked down half the bottle after about a minute or 2. I'd let it get all boggy then let off, go at it again. I dunno if I had enough continuous steam to do any good, but I'll do some more later.

Just reporting back that in fact the knock/click I had is still gone. After driving in cold foggy weather at night and hot weather today. No adverse effects.

Some of you mention that the purge valve line may be hard to reinstall, well I should have mentioned that I didnt disconnect the line from the valve, but rather a short line running from the intake to the cup.

The container I used to hold extra water was a 7-up 2 liter. When I was finished the bottle was at least half full, so I know it was at least 1 liter.

The only thing I worry about is the temperature difference we are creating. Having droplets of water contact the valves and such could cause thermal stress. I used freezing cold water, thinking it would create more of an explosive steam effect.

I'm more worried about what's going to happen when the steam hits the turbine wheel. It's spinning at a good clip by the time the engine is spinning 4000 at a constant idle. water vapor is much denser than normal exhaust gasses. that's why I bubbled the water in instead of just sucking it in straight up. Like letting it suck off the surface so it goes in at about half the rate.

IggDawg: I agree that the water would be very abrasive to the turbo, but the location we are feeding it would be after the turbo.

I think he's tallking on the exit side, turbine side....not compressor side.

From what I remember from my thermo classes.....steam is definitely something that can harm the turbine blades, but the amount of it that is going through, and the length....I wouldn't get my pants in a bunch.

You get moisture in the exhaust normally......you should be fine.

Oh yeah, I guess it does exit. I dont see the steam being a problem, steam is a normal part of combustion (though alot smaller quantity).

I want to get ideas on a way to feed a very small amount of water. I want have a large resovior of water and have it drian slowly over say 40 miles of highway driving. Any controlled stable CHEAP way to do this?