Firstly, the set of injectors came from Scott's car that had a reported 112k miles on the clock, so i was expecting them to be pretty clogged up. After all, the injector cleaning people said they should be done every 40k miles. However, the report i got back with the cleaned injectors showed that the differences between the "before" and "after" were minimal. Before cleaning, they were tested for leaking (all ok), spray pattern (all good) and M/S-RPM (not sure what this is, but they all passed). The measured flow rate was 70 on all but two that came in at 69. After cleaning, the only difference on the report was that they all made 70 on the flow rate, so not a massive improvement on paper for my Ԛ£92.77 including VAT + P&P!
Anyway, here's a couple of pics of one of the old injectors that came out of my car and one of the "new" ones that went back in - see if you can guess which one is which!
Fitting them to the car was a doddle, following the excellent guide that Iain (aka Templ8e30) provided here:
http://www.e30zone.co.uk/modules.php?na ... ic&t=21733. At least it would have been a doddle if i hadn't been so stupid with a cotton bud (see post elsewhere on this forum if i can be brave enough to admit to it!).
Whilst i had the car in bits, i also did a few other maintenance jobs, i.e.:
- cleaned out AFM with carb cleaner
- cleaned out ICV with carb cleaner
- sealed all hose to metal seals with a bit of silicone sealant
- changed the oil/oil filter
I also had to take the entire inlet manifold off due to the incident with the cotton bud, so that was all re-sealed too.
So, what was the end result of this 5 hours hard labour??
Not a great deal i have to say!
The noticeable differences are:
1. Car idles far more smoothly now - gone is the brroom-brroom-broom tractor noise it used to make at idle
2. Pick up from idle is much worse - i have to give it quite a bit of revs before dropping the clutch, especially when cold
3. The excessive exhaust smell i had appears to have gone, though this was made better by raising the CO from 0.1 to 0.8 by adjusting the AFM previously.
4. Acceleration or take-up in gear doesn't seem to be any worse or better.
5. The car is a little quieter to drive - the ticking isn't quite as bad as it was, but it's definitely still there.
The thing is - any of the above could be down to any one of the things i've done. With hindsight, it would have been better to do one thing at a time to see what had which effect. However, i dont get much time to work on the car so this wasn't really feasible.
All in all, i'm quite disappointed that all that effort and money made so little difference. I'm yet to see what's happened to my mpg, which has always been around 21 to 23, so perhaps that will improve. I'd also like to get the CO checked again now that the injectors have been cleaned, all the air intake side has been sealed and the AFM & ICV have been cleaned out. Perhaps that will make a difference now.
Any thoughts on this?
