Re: De-carbon your motor pics
I decarbon'd mine with deep creep the other day, and the water started coming out black as soon as it began smoking.. I'm a skeptic, so at first I didn't necessarily chalk that up to carbon being burned off...until it started coming out clear with little honey-colored slicks of the sea foam oil..
For the record -- it still was smoking, even with clear water.. I absolutely do believe that's just the seafoam itself burning..
And while I didn't do before/after compression tests, I knew going in that my middle cylinder was a bit lower compression than top and bottom just from turning it by hand.. When I was done, the motor was just overall more difficult to turn over by hand and I could just *barely* tell that one cylinder was lower compression.. Took me a couple of full revolutions to decide if one cylinder was still lower at all, and it was fairly obvious before.
Plus, the thing just *ran better* after that..
Perhaps it's possible that this works really well for outboards which have a ton of carbon, and doesn't do much for outboards that are already in pretty good shape, and that folks who haven't been able to get any benefit from it are folks who *really know* outboard motors and don't do the things that cause carbon to build up in the first place...like run their motors for long periods of time at idle speed, or have them overpropped, etc.. I don't *know* that, of course...I'm just speculating.
And for the record, I know better than to do some of the things I do with mine, but I catch myself doing them anyway.. Like, letting it idle forever, etc.. Plus, I didn't own this boat for the first 10 years of its life, so who knows what it was put through before that..
I certainly liked seeing *clear* water coming out the back with those little honey droplets, though.
