What did I do wrong? Sea foam question.

[98Z2885]

Ok well I read up on here on how to use sea foam and suck it into my intake. I removed the brake line, poured the sea foam into a cup, and let the line suck it out. I used half a bottle. The car studdered just a little bit, but never died.. I let it run for a few minutes, and it began to smoke just a little bit out the tail pipes. The idle never changed, it was still running perfect. So I killed the car. I let it sit longer then I wanted it too. roughly 6 hrs. I then came home and started the car up and no smoking at all. I drove it down the free way and never saw any smoke. What did I do wrong?

[98Z2885]

The only thing I didnt do was do a full can. I only did a half of a can. Should I do the rest of it? The can itself said only do 1/3 of a can.

[LS6427]

First mistake was using Sea Foam to clean your top end and pistons. Its just NOT good for that, it DOESN'T work worth a damn, and its risky because you could damage your engine. All Sea Foam does is clean the rear 2 cylinders a little bit. Most of the smoke you see is the Sea Foam burning off....not dirt and grime.

If you want to clean your top end properly and do all 8 cylinders and all 8 intake runners and all 8 chambers in the heads and all 8 pistons.....

Buy Mopar Combustion Chamber Cleaner (MCCC). Its like $7.00-$8.00 a can.

It simply gets sprayed into the lower vaccum port on the intake. Just pull the PCV line off and spray it in with the engine idling. Then when the can starts to run out you have someone standing by to turn the engine off BEFORE the can actually runs dry. Don't you go run and turn it off, have someone do it for you. If you run to turn it off, that 3 seconds will be enough for the foam to get drawn through the engine and out the exhaust, you'll waste it. Then you let it sit for at least 1 hour, the longer the better though. Overnight is good too.
Its also best to do it after the engine is HOT.

MCCC is not a liquid like Sea Foam. Its ACTUALLY a FOAM that expands.........

As it sits in there after you shut the engine off...it expands over time and actually touches every square inch of the intake, heads and cylinders. Sea Foam is a joke and just pools in the back 1-2 cylinders and sits in the rear of the intake.

MCCC has been tough to find lately but a few places are starting to get it again. Just call Dodge dealers till you find it.

Sea Foam is good for one thing.....putting a full can in a half tank of gas every 3-4 months to keep the entire fuel system clean.

.

[Jeff Smith]

Thanks for sharing..I will do it this week for my '01 Camaro.

Originally Posted by LS6427

First mistake was using Sea Foam to clean your top end and pistons. Its just NOT good for that, it DOESN'T work worth a damn, and its risky because you could damage your engine. All Sea Foam does is clean the rear 2 cylinders a little bit. Most of the smoke you see is the Sea Foam burning off....not dirt and grime.

If you want to clean your top end properly and do all 8 cylinders and all 8 intake runners and all 8 chambers in the heads and all 8 pistons.....

Buy Mopar Combustion Chamber Cleaner (MCCC). Its like $7.00-$8.00 a can.

It simply gets sprayed into the lower vaccum port on the intake. Just pull the PCV line off and spray it in with the engine idling. Then when the can starts to run out you have someone standing by to turn the engine off BEFORE the can actually runs dry. Don't you go run and turn it off, have someone do it for you. If you run to turn it off, that 3 seconds will be enough for the foam to get drawn through the engine and out the exhaust, you'll waste it. Then you let it sit for at least 1 hour, the longer the better though. Overnight is good too.
Its also best to do it after the engine is HOT.

MCCC is not a liquid like Sea Foam. Its ACTUALLY a FOAM that expands.........

As it sits in there after you shut the engine off...it expands over time and actually touches every square inch of the intake, heads and cylinders. Sea Foam is a joke and just pools in the back 1-2 cylinders and sits in the rear of the intake.

MCCC has been tough to find lately but a few places are starting to get it again. Just call Dodge dealers till you find it.

Sea Foam is good for one thing.....putting a full can in a half tank of gas every 3-4 months to keep the entire fuel system clean.

.

[lincolnmkv]

Originally Posted by LS6427

All Sea Foam does is clean the rear 2 cylinders a little bit. Most of the smoke you see is the Sea Foam burning off....not dirt and grime.

If you want to clean your top end properly and do all 8 cylinders and all 8 intake runners and all 8 chambers in the heads and all 8 pistons.....

Buy Mopar Combustion Chamber Cleaner (MCCC). Its like $7.00-$8.00 a can.

It simply gets sprayed into the lower vaccum port on the intake.

If it's coming in through the same vacuum line, how would Seafoam only be drawn into two cylinders? Secondly, at 210 degrees farenheit, you would think that the seafoam would boil as soon as it hits the intake runners, giving a steam bath to whatever it touches, and drawing it into every cylinder.

I have never tried the Mopar stuff, but where did you get this information about Seafoam's lack of combustion chamber cleaning ability?

[senicalj4579]

i just dumped seafoam in my crankcase and gas tank a couple days ago. I was gonna dump some in the brakebooster hose in a few. why wouldnt it do all 8 cylenders? maybee cause you should spray it through the tb?

[fleetmgr]

Originally Posted by senicalj4579

i just dumped seafoam in my crankcase and gas tank a couple days ago.

Now go change your oil.

[IWGF]

Holy shit.

[araber89]

Originally Posted by IWGF

Holy shit.

Thank you for your helpful post.

To the OP maybe your car was just clean...

[LS6427]

Originally Posted by lincolnmkv

If it's coming in through the same vacuum line, how would Seafoam only be drawn into two cylinders? Secondly, at 210 degrees farenheit, you would think that the seafoam would boil as soon as it hits the intake runners, giving a steam bath to whatever it touches, and drawing it into every cylinder.

I have never tried the Mopar stuff, but where did you get this information about Seafoam's lack of combustion chamber cleaning ability?

Just look at what happens to our intake air when it passes through the TB and into the intake. Do you think, AT IDLE, that the first intake runner is sucking up the same amount of air as the intake runner in the rear of the intake? NO WAY. The amount if air decreases for each runner as you move rearward. Thats why so many people say the rear cylinders run leaner than the rest sometimes.

Now take a liquid, which is heavier than air, and you let it get sucked into the intake through that brake booster line. The runner right there when it enters the intake is going to get the lions share.....NONE of that liquid is going to magically float throgh the air, passing all of the 7 other runners and make it into the first runner up front. Its just ridiculous to think that can happen. Maybe if you somehow were able to get it in there as a spray mist, maybe then it would travel in the air mass and go into all 8 runners. If I were going to use Sea Foam for top end cleaning because I couldn't find any MCCC...I would at least buy the SPRAY can of Sea Foam so I could spray that in so the mist travels better to all the runners. Maybe even spray half the can ionto the brake booster line in the rear of the intake...then spray the second half of the can into the vaccum port in the front of the intake.

The MCCC is an expanding foam. When I did mine...and shut the engine down right at the end. In about 2-3 minutes I had the foam coming out of the intake vaccum port and squeezing by my TB blade. That means it was expanding throughout the entire inside of the intake, cleaning every inch of it. Ain't no way on earth a liquid can touch the entire inside. Over time...do you realize how much oil goes through your intake. Quarts and quarts...over time. It goes in a tiny bit at a time and coats the entire inside of the intake and the runners.

As far as heat goes....I never said to go for a 1 hour drive and get the entire block and heads totally heat soaked. Just go drive for 15 minutes, which will have certainly caused your t-stat to have opened and closed. The coolant may be 200*, but the inside isn't heat soaked. Big difference between totally heat soaked and a 15 minute drive.

I also never said Sea Foam will not clean the build up in there, but you need to get the Sea Foam liquid to touch the dirty areas and stay there for awhile to do the cleaning. The foam in the MCCC stays there, touches everything in there and soaks for hours touching everything. Liquid is at the mercy of "gravity"..its going to fall down and pool in the lowest areas of the top end. The foam stays......and keeps eating away at the dirt buildup.

You want to really make sure you get your engine as clean as possible without tearing it down to clean it? Thisway you just can;'t have a hot engine. But the foam will still do the work.

Heads/cylinder/pistons:
Remove your intake.
Then take all your spark plugs out.
Then one by one spray MCCC directly into each spark plug hole until foams starts oozing out through the head chambers up top.
Then put the plugs back in real quick just a few turns to keep the foam in there.
If foam did not come up through any of the head chambers because maybe the valves were closed....spray it directly into those spark plug holes until it oozies out of the spark plug holes, then put the spark plugs back in.
Then spray it into those head chambers and fill them up.

Intake: (revised)
Fill each intake runner with the foam.
Let it all sit for 4-5 hours, or whatever. Then scrub each intake runner with a bendable toilet brush.
Now it'll be as clean as you can possibly get it without a tear down.

I think its worth the time to remove the intake to do it that way.

.

[98Z2885]

Originally Posted by araber89

Thank you for your helpful post.

To the OP maybe your car was just clean...

Is that possible these days lol. I dunno. I started on its first tune up yesterday and the plugs being 12 years old and with 105,000 miles on them are surprisingly not totally burnt up. They are getting low, but they were clean on the driver side. I am going to be doing the passenger side this later this week.

[Weezzer]

Originally Posted by LS6427

... The amount if air decreases for each runner as you move rearward. Thats why so many people say the rear cylinders run leaner than the rest sometimes.

If the amount of air decreases as you move rearward, then that would make the back cylinders run RICH, not lean.

Your premise is flawed.

[91RS383]

Some of the premise may be flawed but since the predominant air flow is front to back he is right that a liquid cleaner induced into the rear of the intake can not travel upstream to clean the front cylinders. Sea Foam may be an effective fuel system cleaner when put in the gas tank and atomized through the injectors, but pouring it or sucking it through the brake booster line will not clean all the intake ports or cylinders.

Sea Foam is a light wieght mineral oil. Puting it into your crankcase and driving around on it for a few days is crazy. You are thinning out your oil and possibly disrupting the ballance of the additives in the oil. If you must flush your crankcase, fine. BUT do not drive with anything in your oil!

[LS6427]

Originally Posted by Weezzer

If the amount of air decreases as you move rearward, then that would make the back cylinders run RICH, not lean.

Your premise is flawed.

Maybe the correlation was wrong.....whats the reason that LSx's have always had problems with the rear cylinders running lean????

Either way.........ain't no way a liquid is gonna fly forward, evenly, and enter al lthe intake runners. Thats why I've been trying so hard to tell people they are just about completely wasting their time using Sea Foam on the top end. Its so clear to me. But I guess when someone posts a video of a smoke storm coming from the tailpipes, they think it must be working.

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