De-carboning with water, reloaded

[rs911t]

After reading a hundred or so posts on this subject I decide to give it a try. Take the car out for a spirited spin to get'er warmed up. Back in the driveway, I fill a spray bottle with distilled water. Yank the hand throttle to get a 3,000 rpm idle. Remove the air cleaner, select #4 (the pipe points away from that part of the engine) and give the carb a spritz with the bottle...

Nothing.

Ok, not enough water. So I give it a full spritz, straight down the barrel.

Nothing. Hmmm... Spritz the others. Nothing...

Happily she idles at 3k rpm. Man, it sounds cool with the air cleaner off

Anyway, I remove the sprayer and carefully pour a thumb's worth down barrel #4. This time it bogs, a brief hesitation, but nothing blows out the tail pipe. Cool! Proceed to do the rest the same way with identical results.

The engine didn't explode (my irrational fear was it would - isn't flash boiling water kinda like detonation?). No harm apparently done. But, no gunk was blasted out the pipe either. All-in-all a good sign, I suppose.

FWIW.

[jpnovak]

Try the same thing and let it dribble for 20-30 sec. You may just see some crud out the exhaust.

Its amazing how much water you can add in before the engine really starts to stumble.

[Bill Douglas]

Has anyone done the water trick with a CIS engine?

[Doug Zielke]

See the post on the original thread, where the vac line from the CIS decel valve was used to feed the water.

[tsuter]

Hey - we used to use water injection on custom turbos (even w CIS) to cool the mixture and reduce detonation.
It just doesn't add power.
No big deal.

[Neilk]

Can't wait to here some ask about hyrdo-lock. "I only poured a half gallon into the intake...."

[masraum]

Heheh, I turned the water hose on and then tried to start the car. No, that won't be a good thing.

[osidak]

The thought of pouring water in to my intake scares the hell out of me. You guys are braver than I

[beepbeep]

It's not a big deal, those pistons run pretty fast @ 3000 RPM and will chew trough plenty water before they expirience hydrolock. Water decarboning is clearly a underrated "fixup". It's specially apparent when you take heads off water-injected turbocharged engine and see it's prefectly clean ;-)

P.S. Some cars even had water-injection as standard equipment!

[Evans, Marv]

In the late 50s, we used to pour water down the carburator (on V8s) until the engine really bogged down. A huge cloud of black/grey smoke would billow out of the tail pipe. I recently used something I bought (about $6) from Auto Zone to put in my gas tank to clean the carbon out of the combustion chambers. Don't know how well it worked. I drove it until the tank was gone & didn't see any smoke come out. Water is an old treatment. I would like to install water injection on mine.

[rs911t]

Try the same thing and let it dribble for 20-30 sec. You may just see some crud out the exhaust

Dammit! Now I'll have to drive around to warm the car up again!! See ya

[Spud]

I actually did this years ago on a 72T MFI car, except that my mechanic reccomended I pour Swepco 503 down the throats. You should have seen the white cloud of smoke pouring out of that thing for miles.

The procedure was something like:
warm engine
remove air cleaner housing
pour equal amounts of Swepco 503 into each stack
do not let engine die
get in and drive the piss out of it.

The volume of liquid was something near 1/4 cup in each stack!!

FWIW - YMMV - YADA-YADA-YADA...

[rs911t]

Wow. So I take a turkey baster and dump a dropper full of water down each pipe, again 3-4k rpm. A little smoke outta a couple cylinders but was it with a little bogging. Simply amazing. I think the directions should read something like "pour a 8-oz glass of water into the carburetor."

I wonder if I should try Vodka? "Drink an 8-oz glass, then ... "

[Alan Cottrill]

I just did this on my 77 W/CIS.

I disconnected the vac hose for the Deceleration valve and ran a hose from the throttle body to into a gallon jug of distilled water. The engine vacuum sucked the water out of the jug.

I took the motor up to about 3k rpm and it took about 2 minutes to empty the jug and left a load of black crud on the driveway.

I waited for the engine to come up to full operating temp before I did this. Afterward the intake tubes were cold to the touch and the oil temp came down to just below 170. (not essential to the plot, but I thought it was interesting)

After it warmed back up the idle was smoother than ever. I took it for a spin and WOW! I won’t guess how much power I regained but it is amazing to say the least.

I'm a believer!

[tobluforu]

I do this before every tune up on each and every car I have ever had. Except my saab which has water injection installed. I can shine a flashlight down spark plug hole and the top of the pistons look almost new. Plugs always look like they are new as well. Boost is amazing with this mod when using an apc system.

[tsuter]

On turbos, water injection is used to reduce detonation and pinging. It has the added benefits of decarboning. Most systems use a nozzle installed in the air cleaner and a pressure switch connected to the intake manifold (below the Throttle plate). At a prset pressure the switch automaticallyactivates a connection on the water pump supplying water to the nozzle.
A second windshield washer pump and washer bottle is fine for this set up
We even had "low water" warning lites and buzzers.

[Rick Lee]

OK, now I'm interested in this. Some of you may have heard about the notorious carbon build-up on post '95 993 engines. Would this water treatment work on the last of the air-cooled machines?

[Lucky]

I'm gonna try this on my 3.2!!

I really like the CIS approach with a vacuum line siphon.

Would the ISV connection be a good place to do the same sort of thing on a 3.2? And would it be better do to this upstream, or downstream, of the throttle butterfly?

[Quicksilver]

Just a little word of warning that probably doesn't really apply to cars that are cared for like a Porsche...

A number of years ago my dad was a GM partsman and had a customer come in with a truck that was extremely carboned up. It had been spending hours idling (winter time in Alaska) and it had reached a point where it would barely run with fresh plugs. They quoted the guy for removing the heads and cleaning the chambers which they guy thought was pretty expensive.

One of my dad's co-workers mentioned the "Water bottle overhaul" as a possibility. He explained the method correctly but the guy borrowed an empty coffee pot, went out into the parking lot, wound up the motor, and dumped the pot full of water into the carb. It knocked most of the carbon loose all at once and bent some valves.

My dad brought one of the carbon pieces home and it was a bit over 1/4" thick. He also said they gave the guy a discount on the valve job.


Wayne

[alf]

Could someone post a picture of where to introduce the water on a 3.2 with MFI?

thanks