Carbon clean with DIY walnut shell blaster

[barryrs]

Heres a clip of the process on a Mini - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-HlWELr4Zk

This is a pretty standard service from Mini in the UK now and costs from £250 - £400 depending on the dealer.

[brn7y]

Looks like it is everybody down to Tony's house for a Carbon Clean!

[TonyHayers]

Thanks for those links

Just so i'm clear, the apliance hose is for the hoover to collect the walnut chippings once they've been blasted around the port, and the other hole in you plate is where you position the blaster nozzle?

I assume that the fittings you get with the blaster are standard and will easily fit a hired compressor?

I do like labour saving devices

Ah, yeah, good point -the compressor I hired just had a hose with jubilee clip on the end (muppets) and the blaster gun has a 1/4 inch female (NPT?) adapter, so I bought a 1/4 inch male to barbed hose adapter for couple quid, with some ptfe tape around thread.

I'll get some photos of the vacuum hose etc...

[TonyHayers]

Heres a clip of the process on a Mini - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-HlWELr4Zk

This is a pretty standard service from Mini in the UK now and costs from £250 - £400 depending on the dealer.

Yeah, BMW have a nice vacuum attachment which fits directly onto the port with a little hole for the blaster. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like you can get them from BMW any more (according to my local anyway).

[Timster]

Brilliant Tony,

Probably one of the best threads this year !
Great effort.
Maybe some of the garages could adopt this method and turn-around a carbon-clean much quicker/cheaper ?

[orangepeel]

When can you fit me in mate and how much;-)

[Youngben]

I would be surprised if the likes of MRC say can still justify £1000 for a clean saying this is not good enough! Looks like new to me! Not knocking MRC in any way just saying that this proves how good a job be can done for such little effort! Perhaps they can now offer the same service for less? I'm still going to do my own as I love working on my own car but it would be good for people less confident in what they are doing

[TonyHayers]

I would be surprised if the likes of MRC say can still justify £1000 for a clean saying this is not good enough! Looks like new to me! Not knocking MRC in any way just saying that this proves how good a job be can done for such little effort! Perhaps they can now offer the same service for less? I'm still going to do my own as I love working on my own car but it would be good for people less confident in what they are doing

Do MRC do it all by hand/scrubbing? tbh it did take me a long time and my back is killing me! If I had to charge for it, I reckon I'd charge more than £1000 tbh!

If you were going to do a few cars it would be pretty easy to fabricate a port shaped vac attachment like BMW did for the mini.

[TonyHayers]

Having a bit of a ball ache at the moment. Got everything refitted and all went well and car starts and idles, but got EPC light and traction control light on (does this mean limp mode?). Got throttle body DTCs and throttle body alignment doesn't seem to work :s

Anyone know if there's some sort of calibration/alignment that needs to be done on manifold shaft position sensors?

It was all going far to well...

[adsgreen]

Drive it - I'm sure it needs some distance driven to calibrate the sensors reset by the battery disconnection.
As long as the engine running ok then that's a good start.
Other thing could be the maf has been damaged during the work (they are bloody fragile).
Vag Com diagnostic helpful too.

[adsgreen]

No calibration for manifolds flaps - these wont really be checked until you go over 3k ish rpm. Vag Com does have monitors for expected and actual manifold position.

[TonyHayers]

Phew. Had a bit of a panic there - the nice idle turned into v rough idle and wouldn't rev above 2k, think it was in some sort of severe limp mode. Loads of malfunction errors re throttle body.

So, can't do throttle body alignment if there are other DTCs. VCDS kept playing up* half way through clearing DTCs so it hadn't actually cleared an ECU related one (pretty sure that's to do with camshaft being moved during clean). Manually went through each controller and cleared faults and then after a few tries (and turning ignition on and off) got the tba to work properly so I got an "OK". Warning lights went out on dash and car started and ran perfectly. Drove for couple of miles and then checked VCDS and no errors. Win.

I'll get those photos of vacuum/blaster plate up in a few mins..

* Off-topic: anyone have the thing where VCDS keeps saying "interface not ready" during an Autoscan? It used to do it when I ran it under VMware but since I got a netbook to run it on was working completely fine until today.

[adsgreen]

Yeah mine did that when looking for a vacuum leak.

[TonyHayers]

Ok, here's some more photos as promised.

To help provide a good seal and mask off the area, I lined each port with gaffer tape...



Then, placed the adapter "plate" over the port with vacuum pipe attached...



Underside of adapter, showing wood insert shaped to fit port. Bit worse for wear after a pummelling from walnut and carbon...



Top of adapter plate. The black pipe bit is a 22mm plastic plumbing pipe insert with a bit of gaffer tape to make it a tight fit with vacuum pipe...



Blaster fits through other hole in adapter plate and is heavily countersunk so the blaster can be rotated and "wiggled"...



Appliance hose fit nicely over the dyson handle attachment. I should mention that there is a bit of a drawback to this approach, in that it puts a lot of strain on the vacuum motor and it heats up a lot. I triggered the thermal cutout a few times which means that the vacuum was out of action for around an hour until it cooled down. To get round this, I just ran it for 30 seconds at a time, then turn off vacuum and inspect port etc. I tried with just having a smaller hose inserted a foot or so up the dyson hose, but then you don't have the suction power you need to keep up with the blaster...



Makeshift hopper...



In progress...



Whilst everything was stripped, I thought I'd give the filthy valve covers a good clean...

[j1sgo]

Excellent job simple solution that makes a crappy job much more bearable.

Something I will be doing Christmas time before other work (manifold/gut cats/remap etc)

Think this thread should definitely be in the FAQ section above my CAF how too