Well men....
As promised please find below a DIY and "how to guide" for manual inlet valve cleaning on your Mk5 GTI. Hope people will find this lot helpful,,,,
To start with myself and my buddy used this guide from YouTube.
The video is long but very comprehensive.
Unfortunately my car has an AXX engine so we were about two hours trying to figure out how to remove the fuel rail assembly as the AXX inlet manifold has a totally different setup to the one in the video. But for most of you guys your engines will be similar to the one in the video.
The tools I selected for the job were,,,,
A chemical product from BG for the actual cleaning. This stuff is not for sale to the public but a local Indy garage sold me it for €50
Then some long handled picks and an assortment of Nylon, Brass and Metal brushes which attach to your drill which both came from Amazon.
Also you'll see in the picture a suction pump I bought of eBay. It was very handy and a key piece of kit.....
Then from your local VW dealership you'll need...
1) Inlet manifold gasket
2) Throttle body gasket
3) Injector seals and rebuild kit
So far my costs were
€50 for the chemical cleaner
€90 for the parts from VW
€55 for the stuff from eBay and Amazon
I'd had a quote from an Indy garage to clean the valves for €350. So far I'd already spent €200! When you add in the time it took us (12hrs) this is definitely not an efficient way to save money
But it was never about the money. It's all about the learning and the adventure
So......
We whipped it all apart and this is what greeted us.....
Cylinder 1
Cylinder 2
Cylinder 3
Cylinder 4 (the valves are open)
We did a leak down test with petrol on cylinders 1, 2 and 3. The valves were seating well and not leaking. So we taped off cylinder number 4 (whose valves were open) to make sure no crud and crap would get down into the cylinder.
We removed all four injectors and cleaned and taped off their inlet tracts.
We followed the instructions for the BG inlet valve cleaning product.
This involves soaking the valves with the first chemical for 30 minutes. We agitated the valves with the chemical and the nylon and brass brushes attached to our drill. Then we sucked the whole lot out with the pump pictured above.
We did not use the metal brushes as we thought they looked to aggressive.
Then we added chemical number two which we left for just a few minutes and sucked out again.
We also had an old Hoover to hand which was very valuable! I'm not sure you would want to use your everyday household Hoover. But if you have an old one lying around it's a good thing to have!
In hindsight; we should have spent much more time scraping the carbon off the valves by hand when it was dry (and before adding the chemical). We did this on cylinder four and we had a much quicker and better result.
The valve cleaning chemical is good, but it makes the carbon Gooey and hard to suck out/remove. Scraping it off when it is dry and sucking it out with a hoover is definitely the way to go before adding any liquid chemicals.
We had hoped to have time to clean and test each injector. But with the faffing of removing the inlet manifold we ran out of time. So we had to settle for just giving the tips and shafts a good clean with carb cleaner.
Cleaning the air dividing plates was very easy in the bench vice with just some carb cleaner and a wire brush.
Anyways,,, feast your eyes below for the finished product!!
Dirty air divider plates and injectors before being rebuilt with new seals.....
Air divider plates all cleaned up! And injectors rebuilt and ready to go back in!
Cylinder one clean!
Cylinder two clean!
Cylinder three clean!
Cylinder four clean!
And here is a little YouTube video to show you in a bit better detail!!
We flung everything back together and breathed a major sigh of relief when the car fired up pretty much straight away and ran perfect.
So..... Was it worth it????
It was a really satisfying job to do, and it is very nice to know that the inlet valve are now clean.
But if I am honest I have noticed virtually no difference in how the car drives.
Throttle response and induction note are possibly a little sharper and louder respectively. But it is pretty subtle stuff!
Either way I'm just really pleased to know they are clean. The car has 75,000 miles on it and they've obviously never been done before.
Hope this extremely long post will be of some value to somebody out there
I want to especially say a HUGE thank you to my good buddy Mark who helped me out with this. He's a Peugeot Master Technician so firstly I have to apologise for forcing him to work on a filthy VW
Without his garage, tools, knowledge, patience and Red Bull this job never woulda been completed. So... Thanks Mark
Please feel free to fire questions at me as I'm sure I have left lots and lots of stuff out.
Regards,
Dave