left recirc vent open on intake, what to do?

[outersquare]

The recirculate pipe from the valve cover to the intake, I left that open while changing my air filter last week. Leaves a ~1 cm diameter circular hole in the intake.

Been driving it around like that for ~200 miles before I discovered it. Pulled off the intake tube to clean up the tube and throttle body. TB and intake tubing had a thin layer of dirt when I wiped it up. Found a little pebble on the TB also, though I might have just dropped that in while opening it up (realistically any larger pieces of dirt wouldn't be just resting on the TB?).

My question is, do I need to take additional action to clean up the engine? Me being kind of anal about this, I'm thinking maybe I should pull off the whole intake manifold and clean it out. Is this necessary or overkill?

 

[Gary Allan]

Well, others may disagree, but I would just use tb cleaner ..get the related hardware clean ..do the tb ..use enough for the intake too...get where the PCV system taps in since that will be where the blow by residue will trap the dirt that didn't already go into the rest of the engine. I'd then change the oil.

My thought is that taking off the intake is like getting an operation. There's always risk of side effects and natural insult with the operation itself. You'll be exposing the engine to perhaps more insult in the action. Most of it won't add up to squat in the long term life of the engine ..but you don't want to accellerate the aging process with added insult.