Intake System Carbon Cleaning - Change Recommended Every 30,000 to 60,000 Miles

This last maintenance item is one of the hardest services to convince most customers to have done yet is potentially one of the most important to the longterm life & health of the engine along with restoring engine performance that may have been so slowly decreasing over time that the owner / driver may not even notice.

Here’s why…….

Almost every modern auto engine produced currently by any manufacturer today isa turbocharged gasoline direct injection engine. That is high tech speak for the systems required these days to build a high performance fuel efficient engine. BMW & MINI have been making this type of engines since 2007 and since 2012 is the only type being used in all of their cars. This high performance fuel efficient engine comes with an undisclosed price though and most customers don’t find out until after the warranty is over. What is this“price” ?

These engines build up a sometimes massive amount of carbonized oil &gasoline vapor deposits that fill the air intake tracts & cover the intake valves to the point of choking off the air that the engine needs to breath in order to run properly. This shows up first as a slightly rougher than normal idle and slight hesitation when accelerating. At first it wouldn’t even be strong enough to set off a “Service Engine Soon” check engine light. As the carbon progressively builds up the misfire becomes more pronounced and may even shift from cylinder to cylinder. Sometimes this does set off a “Service EngineSoon” warning and continues to be rough even if the spark plugs and coils are changed. Here’s a picture to illustrate what we are talking about. You don’t have to be a mechanic to see the difference between the clean system and the choked up system. The bad one looks like the bottom of your barbecue grill.

Obviously the picture to the right is the bad, carboned up, clogged system and the bottom picture is what a nice, healthy good system looks like. Cleaning this carbon out is no easy chore either and is way worse to dothan that barbecue grill. Fortunately, we have the proper tools and have done this numerous times. What happens if you don’t have this done? The engine performance degrades slowly but surely and if left unchecked then may even result in one of those dreaded catastrophic failures. Ask our Boss, Voytek! His personal 2010 530i station wagon, with just 60,000 miles on it, broke down two blocks from our shop and had to be pushed into the shop. Without any warning signs one of the valves broke off and in just a few seconds of running damaged the engine so badly that he had to find a complete replacement engine. Turns out the valves were carboned up so badly you could barely see them when we had the engine apart. What a hard lesson to learn!! Ask more than a few MINI Cooper owners about bad, carboned up valves and they will tell you similar stories. The repair costs are more than 5 times the price of the cleaning preventative maintenance.

Get that carbon cleaning ( AKA “the walnut shell blast” ) done every 30,000 to60,000 miles! Your car will love you!