Author Topic: Carbon cleaning and replacing intake manifold - photos of inlet valves at 76,000  (Read 563 times)

Offline ianr8

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In addition to fitting the Rocketwires puddle lights and retrofitting a 'low' genuine VW factory reversing camera recently I took the opportunity to replace all 8 fuel injectors and the intake manifold.

Why you might ask? I bought the car in Aug 2019 with 69,000miles on the clock. It has always run perfectly except for a slightly lumpy idle (no fault codes present). A change of spark plugs, air filter, coils and pvc valve didn't improve things (all done myself). Yes, it had the leaking thermostat housing which I've also replaced.

So I bit the bullet and have replaced all 8 injectors (4 in the combustion chamber and 4 in the intake manifold - all genuine parts).

Whilst going to the trouble of taking the manifold off I thought I might as well replace it as well (£312 - genuine part) bearing in mind I'm doing this myself and not paying any labour charges or VAT.

To cut a long story short the car now drives superbly (with an instantaneous response to the throttle which may of course be psychological) however more importantly the idle is rock steady and you would be hard pressed to tell the engine is running ( 2013 220bhp manual) at idle. It's fair to say I'm smitten with the car now.

Attached are some photos of the before and after of the inlet valves, the intake manifold and the injectors from the combustion chamber. I tried walnut blasting but it makes a lot of mess so in the end I used intake manifold cleaner which I let soak for 30 mins per inlet before scraping with a set of picks, brass drill brushes and cable ties (there's a USA Audi valve cleaning procedure TSB for the FSI motors - it woks).

Overall the whole procedure including replacing all injectors took around 12 hours. Anyone who says they can carbon clean your inlet valves in 4 hours is perhaps not doing it quite so thoroughly.

The car is now at 76,000 miles when I did all this last week.

As to which injectors where causing the lumpy idle (no fault codes at all) I would say looking at the carbon build up the 4 in the combustion chamber are the most likely culprits - but please don't get me started on high octane fuel as I don't know what it was run on before (though I've always run it on Shell V power since I've owned it). Of course I could have cleaned all 8 injectors and put them back in and the car may have run just as well however I didn't fancy doing it all again in case it didn't fix it. For me the cost of replacing these parts was well worth it.
 
Fingers crossed it's all set up for the next 75,000 miles!

Hope this proves of some value to folks with a higher mileage car.











































« Last Edit: 23 June 2022, 21:32 by ianr8 »