my regaine as a piston soak experiment (pics)

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This past march I obtained another Geo Metro. This one was a 93 with only 52,000 miles on it. Auto working air and 35mpg in town. Paid $1,100 for it. Car ran well, but uses a little oil and had some minor to moderate pinging once warmed up.

Iam just finishing up 1,500 mile with auto-rx in the oil. I have also run FP60 for 1,300 miles and regaine for 200 miles I had cleaned out a plugged EGR intake port and that helped with the pinging by about 50%. I also checked the timing to ensure that it was at factory specs. Being cheap, and not wanting to run premium gas, I decided to do a piston soak before going into my auto-rx rinse phase. This way all the solvents in the oil will be change out before the rinse phase.

So here is what I did. I poured about 1oz regaine into each cylinder. let it soak for 30 minutes then used a foam bruch (kind to cleand tape heads with) to swish the regaine around in the pistons. I tested the foam brush first with regaine to make sure it wouldn't desolve in the regaine inside the piston. I used a mytivac pump to pump the regaine out. Then I repeated twice and am going to let the 3rd batch soak over night. Then on Monday, I will rotate the crank 180 degrees and repeat the process. The pictures show how dark the fluid was the first time I pulled it out. By looking thru the spark plug hole, you could know see some clean metal on the piston tops. I was surprised at how dark the fluid was..

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I will update on Monday.
 
I think that the probable/possible ring pack cleaning is going to be of more benefit than a little carbon removed from the tops of the pistons.
 
I like this. Always wondered what good that stuff was when diluted 100:1 in the tank.

If one doesn't have a mity-vac they can always throw a rag over the spark plug holes and crank the car to blow that stuff out... a la MMO soak.
 
Finished my second soak tonight. I then pulled as much of the crud out with the mityvac as i could. I used techron as a rinse and pulled it out again. Looking down the sparkplug hole I could see some bare metal, but lots of carbon was still there.

My only concern is what happens to the small chunks of carbon that are loose and stitting on the piston tops when I run the car???

BTW, no more pinging!! drove the car to work tonight and no more pinging (at least for now).

The car did take a while to start the first time and wasn't happy about it either.
 
Hopefully they aren't big enough to break a piston. I think that there should't be a problem with it.

So, how long total, did you let the stuff soak?
 
Total soaking time was just short of 24 hours, but I did change the 1oz in each cylinder about 4-5 times during that 24 hours. Used a whole bottle of regaine and 1/2 bottle techron.

So you are saying the any loose chunks or chunks of carbon that come loose would come out thru the exhaust system? Interesting..

No doubt that the car is better off than before the piston soak. Was it worth the time and effort? I think so. Even though the pinging wasn't that bad, it was driving me nuts.
 
In my MB diesel, we would ream the glowplug holes out when changing the, em... glowplugs.

Instructions were to ream all holes and then crank the engine with the holes unobstructed to blow the carbon out.

So long as you let most of the stuff evaporate, I see no reason why you couldnt do the same here... heck, you have an electrical fuel pump (mine was mechanical), so you can disconnect that and not have a worry at all!

Of course change your oil before use and then shortly thereafter...

JMH
 
Ross, I am just getting in on your experiment. Other than no more pinging, what other improvements did you notice? Did it stop burning oil? Did the mileage improve? Does it start up quicker? To blow out the chunks of carbon, did you try the suggested idea of cranking the engine over with the spark plugs removed? I always thought it would be great in a situation like this to have a small camera that could be inserted in the spark plug hole like they did in the old Z Max infomercial. You could rotate it so you could see the entire piston top, cyl. head and valves.
 
We do this same operation in the shop at times. Most commonly on 1ZZ corollas, where the rings stick in their lands and cause excess oil consumption. I use Toyota top engine cleaner, but with my own cars, I like to use GM top engine cleaner. I feel it works a bit better and it seems just a bit thicker. Maybe one of the only things that GM can beat Toyota at ;-)

Greg
 
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