Originally Posted By: Starman2112
Originally Posted By: Trav
Originally Posted By: Starman2112
Waste of money imo. Injectors are self-cleaning. Just use top tier fuel from a high volume station and you're good to go.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Read this from a man who's owned his own shop since 1974 and studied quality management under W. Edwards Deming. I'll take his advice thank you.
http://www.agcoauto.com/content/news/p2_articleid/165
In an ideal world its true you would not need any sort of addition cleaners unfortunately that world doesn't exist for the vast majority of people.
Thing you can control in the ideal world would be, buy a car with plastic tank, lines and injectors with stainless internals and one with an external filter not just the internal one mounted in the pump/sending unit unit and maintain that filter.
Things beyond your control, anything to do with where the fuel is refined or stored, the condition of the tanks, the fuels moisture/water content, phase separation at best causing a dropout of octane boosting ethanol at worst a high water/moisture content mix now very corrosive fuel.
Heat from combustion on DI injectors causing them to actual sustain heat damage far up the injector which I have seen on a few Mazda's.
Regular port injectors are not immune to heat, after shut down they heat soak and some of the fuel can and usually does varnish right in the injector over time.
To prove this point one only has to look at Evinrudes recommendation of letting the engine idle after extended higher rpm runs for a while to cool the hot injectors down with circulating fuel on the E Tech units.
The real world is much different, even with the best brands of fuel from high volume stations is no guarantee. Even if the car was bough just a few years ago they are not immune to ethanol issues. Used cars may have been run on cheap gas, have rust in their metal tanks, lack of filter maintenance and corrosion in the the injectors.
While the additives in top tier fuel may address some cleanliness issues it doesn't come close to preventing corrosion in an old style injector that had few if any stainless components, like a Bosch 1 pintel style which were still being used in the 2000's. For these and a few others like the old Kehin's you must run an additive to prevent corrosion of the pintel needle.
I clean and rebuild a lot of injectors every day but also flow match and do 55v marine and racing injectors. I get to see what they look like inside.
I have tested Redline SI-1 on old style pintel injectors, I cleaned them properly, checked their flow and spray pattern against the Bosch provided data then tested them 30K later. 3oz per full tank of the Redline was used every tank, this was E10 fuel.
No corrosion of the pintel, same flow and spray pattern as when they were first cleaned. They had previously gone 25K with no additive and had reduced flow and poor spray pattern on multiple injectors, the needles had deposits but no pitting (fortunately they had only been run on E0 fuel up to this point). That's good enough for me to recommend it.
For used car I suggest a two prong approach, a good PEA cleaner like Redline, Gumout Regain (I suspect the orange high mileage may have more PEA), Techron All in One, possibly others for a full tank then Berrymans Chemtool (very cheap) to go after any remaining varnish deposits for the next tank, Berrymans is far more effective on these deposits.
Fuel filter maintenance is imperative in preventing particles getting into the injectors filter baskets, theoretically anything that can get through the filter should be small enough to get past the nozzle in reality it doesn't work that way. These tiny deposits like to stick to any varnish and find their way into every possible crevice inside and accumulate, at this point they do not break up and will plug the injector like this #3.
New filter vs old, this old one isn't that bad, I see much worse.
A 55V DI pump injector nozzle, there is no preventing this, it is plugged and must be taken apart to clean it.
Clean small tank, I use 3 different tanks.
After doing a set of 4 that had been bead blasted and totally clean outside, this is from inside the injectors. Same fluid is the same I always use the lighting is the reason for color difference.
Finally a set of matched injectors with less than 0.5% difference vs 3-5% OE spec with as close to a perfect pattern as you can get without going custom.
Phase separation article from Veeder Root.
http://blog.veeder.com/phase-separation-what-are-the-implications
Edit BTW I started in the Automotive trade in 1971 so I have a little experience.
