Best way to Seafoam engine..?

[Cerberus]

Maybe snake oil is too harsh. It's just another mix of light lubricants and solvents. It will clean grease and other gunk that solvents bind to. So will kerosene and isopropyl alcohol. Oh right, it *is* kerosene and isopropyl alcohol. So if you like the ideal of sucking kero and IPA into various parts of your engine, by all means seafoam away.

not to try to convince you, but just so you know, one of the old school tricks for knocking carbon off valves and out of combustion chambers for hot rods was to remove the aircleaner, take a glass of water in one hand, and the throttle in the other, and pour the water down the intake at a rate slow enough to avoid hydrolock, but fast enough that it would stall the engine without additional throttle input(which is why you keep one hand on the throttle and open it up as needed)

now to the average person this sounds like pure folly.. a waste of time..
but it works quite well.
or as another example, ask any mechanic how a combustion chamber looks on a cylinder where the head gasket went, allowing coolant into the chamber.

the answer you'll get is "steam cleaned"

my point being that while you may not think a product is everything it is cracked up to be by virtue of its MSDS, many many people having had positive results kind of refutes your assumptions.

[Honclfibr]

I'm not saying it's not effective, I'm sure it is. Solvents clean. My point is, if you were to mix 1 part coleman camping fuel with 1 part rubbing alcohol and then cut it with 2 parts automatic transmission fluid, you might get looked at kinda funny for sucking that shit into your intakes and/or crankcase. But label it "seafoam" and it's a magical mystery product.

There's nothing magic about sea foam is all I'm saying. There are pros and cons to sucking solvents into your engine. The pro being, they're going to clean shit. The con being, they're going to remove lubrication from your internal engine parts. The light oil may make up for that somewhat, but what I'm saying is by knowing what "seafoam" actually is helps to understand exactly what it's doing inside your engine when it's in there so you can make a more informed decision about whether that's something you want...

[Cerberus]

I'm not saying it's not effective, I'm sure it is. Solvents clean. My point is, if you were to mix 1 part coleman camping fuel with 1 part rubbing alcohol and then cut it with 2 parts automatic transmission fluid, you might get looked at kinda funny for sucking that shit into your intakes and/or crankcase. But label it "seafoam" and it's a magical mystery product.

There's nothing magic about sea foam is all I'm saying. There are pros and cons to sucking solvents into your engine. The pro being, they're going to clean shit. The con being, they're going to remove lubrication from your internal engine parts. The light oil may make up for that somewhat, but what I'm saying is by knowing what "seafoam" actually is helps to understand exactly what it's doing inside your engine when it's in there so you can make a more informed decision about whether that's something you want...

i agree, there's nothing more magic about seafoam than is magical about a glass of water.

..then again, water IS the source of all life on the planet..


point being, a truly informed decision would require a masters in thermodynamics and chemistry at the very least.
BUT with a strong track record of proven success (or at least no damage done) i'd say that is what most people want/need to know.

[SSearchVT]

Most of the time I'm not a fan of the 'Mechanic in a Can' products. If the engine is barely running, or backfiring - it's probably too late to have them be effective. At this point you need to get the tools out and do the job right - sometimes the best tools are a pen and a checkbook.

But - as part of routine mantainence I run carb clean through everything once or twice a year. I also run store safe through the last few tanks of the year - you never really know when winter is going to hit here.

If you really want to add a level of safety to running cleaner through the engine - run it through in the tank before doing an oil change.

[Ericthejet]

This product gets a lot of attention and in most cases only positive reviews.

If I had to try a product along these lines I would try Seafoam.

[Woodsy]

This debate is as old as the product itself but the facts are simple:

Does it harm your engine? no

Does it provide a benefit (however slight)? Yes

while it is true you could mix these chemicals yourself i doubt you could do it for the 9 bucks it cost to buy seafoam. there has been no evidence to say that this will damage your engine and it has an almost 90 track record of performance. I doubt anyone of us has used this and then tore down the engine to see the results but i can tell you from first hand experience that it does smooth out the bike after a winter of storage. Shoud you use seafoam as a panacea? no, it is not a replacement for regular maintainence or needed repair. Seafoam does not claim to be the cure all for your motoring woes. the term "snake oil" decribed a product that claimed to cure ailments that it did not. Seafoam says it cleans engines and smooths out idle. This is exactly what it does so in my personal opinion the lable does not fit.

[Billy]

http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...q=0&oq=seafoam

[Billy]

Seafoam will always be a debate.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...q=Does+seafoam

[Honclfibr]

I wonder if there's water in there as well...without it you'd end up with a pretty volatile mixture, naptha is white gas and that's some scary flammable shit, IPA is flammable as well, even cutting it with light oil you're gonna end up with a nasty mixture that I would think would be likely to detonate if sucked into the engine...unless they added quite a bit of water or some other inert liqiuid...

[Billy]

Here's my actual question:

If you legitmately take care of your bike, ride it often, treat the fuel properly (stabil) over the winter, do you actually need to use this stuff? I can see using it in a situation where a bike has been sitting for years and all the internals are varnished.

[Cerberus]

Here's my actual question:

If you legitmately take care of your bike, ride it often, treat the fuel properly (stabil) over the winter, do you actually need to use this stuff? I can see using it in a situation where a bike has been sitting for years and all the internals are varnished.

Valve train, fuel injector pintle and combustion chamber deposits happen, pretty much no matter what. Arguably even more if you ride nice versus wringing it out more often.

Cleaning those deposits will make a noticable difference in running quality.

[Nix]

IPA is used as a water remover and gas-line antifreeze. (HEET products)

[Woodsy]

for a group of so called "motoring enthusiasts" the fact that the Seafoam debate has not reached 12 pages by now is weak!

[Honclfibr]

IPA is used as a water remover and gas-line antifreeze. (HEET products)

Right, IPA bonds to water, lowering the freezing point and the flash point. This prevents the water from freezing in your fuel lines and also allows it to be combusted more easily. IPA is in the same family as ethanol (alcohols), which is why you don't see problems with water in the gas as much any more now that they add 10% ethanol to gasoline, there's basically no need for dry gas products anymore...

As far as the seafoam, it will be the naptha that is doing most of the work. Naptha, or "white gas" (sold as coleman camp fuel, or zippo lighter fuel), is a very strong solvent. It's also extremely volatile. If you were to add it to the intake in high concentrationit would probably clean your engine of all the gunk and such right before it exploded due to detonation.

When I was a kid, I once used a jug white gas to clean some auto parts, mistaking it for kerosene. It worked very well but my father was rather displeased to see me dipping parts in it. It got them clean like you wouldn't believe, but I'm extremely lucky that I didn't get blowed up in the process...

[Honclfibr]

Ok, one last bit of chemistry for the thread...so solvents are basically classified as either polar and nonpolar. Polar solvents dissolve polar molecules like water, and nonpolar solvents dissolve nonpolar molecules like oil and grease.

The interesting thing about the alcohol family is that it has both a polar and nonpolar component to the molecule. This makes it able to dissolve both polar (water) and nonpolar (oil, grease) molecules, although not as well as a strong polar or nonpolar solvent. That's why you see it used in a lot of applications where a weak, general purpose solvent is required.

[flyer_kaz]

heres a test one guy did... even visually inspected his internals before and after the seafoam...

taken from this Kawasaki forums link..

http://www.kawasakimotorcycle.org/fo...t-seafoam.html


"Anyone got a good receipe for crow?

When we last visited this topic, I managed to tick off most who responded in the thread, and everyone insisted I was wrong. Being the bull headed sort that I am I had decided that Seafoam could not do everything claimed, and had to be just another can of snake oil that managed to sell based on empty promises that could not be proven or disproven. You see I am old enough to remember the thing with Quaker State oil and STP oil treatment. Back in the mid-seventys using both would actually cause engine damage. Both were claiming to quiet noisy lifters, well they did, trouble was when combined in the old engines they made a heavy sludge that would clog oil passages. Follow that with Slick 50 having to stop saying that their product actually did anything, and you can see where I became skeptical of any addative.

Well with nearly everyone singing the praises of Seafoam, and after being scorched by a couple of you I decided it was time to put up or shut up. I bought a can to test in my bike and my truck.

Step 1 of the bike test.
Pull the plugs, the reed valves, and the carbs. With a borrowed Hawkeye bore scope I looked into the combustion chamber of both cylinders, the intake track, and valves, and the exhaust valves and upper end of the exhaust head pipes. Black soot, some slight varnish, and a bit of carbon build up. Kinda suprised me how dirty it really was. To my thinking (before looking) the bike was in as good a shape as it could be.

Step 2
Since I had about 1 gallon of gas in the tank I added 1 oz of seafoam (directions say 1 oz per gallon of gas when added to gas in tank) Reassembled and started bike. Rode 2 miles to the local ATM, then 4 miles to the nearest gas station. Shut the bike off, topped off the tank,went home and added 3 more ozs of seafoam and went for a romp along some of my favorite roads.

Step 3 remove plugs, carbs, and reed valves and look again.

Results:
First things I noticed were while riding. within 15 miles the engine / exhaust note gradually changed. At 26 miles I realized I was not down shifting for some of the low speed hills that had been requiring a downshift to keep the engine smooth. At 45 miles I intentionally did a 6th gear roll on from 20 miles per hour. A bit rough at 20, but between 25 and 30 the engine quit lugging, and pulled smoothly all the way to 70. Closing the throttle resulted in a smooth sounding deceleration. 153 miles later I topped off the tank again gas milage was 59.9987 not bad for how I was riding. Got home let the bike cool off, and pulled the plugs, the reed valves, and the carbs. Hmmmm... clean, all of it. There was normal discoloration, but the soot, the carbon, and the varnish traces were all gone!!!

Anybody got a good recipie for crow? This stuff really does wonders.

Truck test to follow."

Hard to beat a real-world test and results by your normal joe with visual inspection of the internals before and after the seafoam treatment... I mean... what other proof do you need..? and like Woodsy said before... even if it does nothing... the thousands of people who have used it before and are still running their motorcycles, cars, boats, whatever.. are running fine, regardless if it did anything at all. At the worst you wasted $5...

[ThisBitch]

My sister made me wear a seafoam green dress in her wedding.


My sister's a bitch.

[KB]

photoshop!

KB