removing carbon buildup

[john_bud]

Excellent point Dave!

Maybe an ultrasonic humidifier directed at the air intake (with the filter out) would get enough water in to clean the carbon off.

I do know that cylinders with blown head gaskets are clean enough to eat off of, steam works. The down sides of doing it on purpose are less clear to me....

jb

 

[dqdave1]

I have a steamer for cleaning things; what do you think if I held the steamer to the intake ( filter removed) and let it idle with it sucking the steam in? Will it help with carbon?

 

[kmdigital]

Are you sure it's carbon? If it's carbon, you should be able to shave it off by working it up and down and twisting it, but I doubt that you have that much carbon on them. Glow plugs that are working won't carbon up, because they get red hot, which definitely burns off the carbon.

More likely it is that they glow plugs are bad, and like any electrically heated device, glow plugs can expand enough as they fail to prevent them from being removed easily, if at all. This is bad, and forcing it, may well cause the tip to break off, because there is no way it will come back up through the hole in its expanded condition. In these cases, the only real solution is to remove the head, break the bottom off, extract the top, and put it all back together.

I've heard of some mechanics that just break them off, push the tip down into the cylinder and install a new one and call it good. Maybe it blows out the exhaust valve and muffler, but most likely it becomes embedded into the top of the piston. I guess they think that it is probably pretty soft anyway due to its deteriorated condition, so they take the easy route. I guess it depends how valuable the engine is to you!

 

[DieselPower]

Good point kmdigital. If the glow plug tip has expanded as often happens when they go bad you will not be able to remove it. OTC makes a special split nut remover for glow plugs. If the tip actually breaks off then you have to pull the head. Leaving it in the cylinder is just asking for a major mechanical failure.

 

[john_bud]

I've heard of some mechanics that just break them off, push the tip down into the cylinder and install a new one and call it good.

Yowchie!!

I would probably have to bust off the end of my boot and leave it inserted in the mechanic's waste pipe if I ever saw that happen!!

Let's see the size 12's work its way out....

 

[BotaBigot]

Back in the day of the dieselized GM gas engine, I had a failure in the glowplug circuit that let the plugs overheat. This caused them to become distorted and some even melted. I couldn't remove them all without some breaking off in the cylinders. Yep, head removal time...