fuel additive

[clelly]

I thought I might use a fuel additive such as slick 50 to clean petrol injectors.
Has anyone used this product and can pass comment, or recommend a better one.
Thanks

 

[jberks]

It probably won't cause any issues and could be good for it, provided there isn't some gunk that is actually helping.
I tend to use 1 tank of super plus type fuel every 2-3 tanks as they contain lubricants and detergents which do the same thing.

 

[mioba]

theres been posts about this over the years.
try sticking to a premium fuel or use it once in a while, thats what its made for.

As mentioned alot of the premium fuels contain all these additives.

personally i use premium fules and once a year a shot of redex.

 

[jimsinessex]

I stick a £5 can of Wynnes petrol injector cleaner in the fuel tank every 6000 miles. There is a noticable improvement in engine smoothness and response. The car is run almost exclusively on ASDA petrol and I believe this treatment compensates for the lower detergent content of supermarket fuels.

As an added bonus I used to suffer the erratic fuel gauge symptoms that seem to plague C class and CLK class cars, now I have gone at least 100,000 miles after starting this regime without a single problem and the fuel tank senders are still original at 166,000 miles. I have concluded the problem with the senders is actually due to a buildup of deposits at the top end of the sender range and not corrosion as previously suggested on other threads. These deposits are cleaned off by the injector cleaner in the tank if it is added when brimming the tank with fuel.

At 30 mpg this works out at about a half pence extra per litre, cheaper than buying premium petrol at my local rate of 6p/litre more. A guaranteed increase of more than 2.0mpg would be needed to justify the price of the premium fuel just to break even.

Jim

 

[eric242340]

I thought I might use a fuel additive such as slick 50 to clean petrol injectors.
Has anyone used this product and can pass comment, or recommend a better one.
Thanks

The following is the part number for official Mercedes Benz fuel addative;A000 989 25 45 12

 

[MarkF]

Has anybody used a fule additive on the 270CDi engine.
Thought about doing this on my ML but I thought I would ask the wise ones first.

 

[eric242340]

Has anybody used a fule additive on the 270CDi engine.
Thought about doing this on my ML but I thought I would ask the wise ones first.

There are many addatives on the market, but a neat trick ive learnt by accident is putting a tiny amount of ATF (Automatic Transmission Fluid) in the tank. For some strange reason it really does decarbonize without damage. Some addatives take all the carbon out and thats not good for an engine. Also ATF is great for tanks that have been contaminated with water.

 

[Hurm]

There are many addatives on the market, but a neat trick ive learnt by accident is putting a tiny amount of ATF (Automatic Transmission Fluid) in the tank. For some strange reason it really does decarbonize without damage. Some addatives take all the carbon out and thats not good for an engine. Also ATF is great for tanks that have been contaminated with water.

I used to work in the racing game in North America and a quick decoke used to be, run the engine at 3000rpm with the air filter off and gently dribble ATF down the carb - keep the engine running and wait for the smoke to clear! Sounds barbaric but it used to take most of the carbon out of the combustion chambers and it used to make a marked difference to engine perfomance. I would not suggest doing this to a Merc engine as I dont know quite how it would react. The engines we used to do the running decoke on were 70's V8's, no ECU or fuel injection. Typical US engines, agricultural but quite strong!

 

[Wezzel]

I'm on my second diesel. The first one was a Peugeot which had done 167k miles when I sold it (running fine). My current car, a C220cdi has 175k miles on the clock and runs like a dream.

I have never replaced an injector and I attribute this to using supermarket diesel with a small shot of Redex injector cleaner at every fill up. A bottle costs something like £11.99 and does 8 tank fulls which works out no different from using premium diesel.

I did stop using it for a while in the Merc and started getting a bit of diesel "knock". This went away immediately after resuming the treatment.

 

[D3Less]

I like to use Forte additives every so often and have never had any problems (although my cars have been fairly new recently) you can only buy it through garages that use it, or ebay
Was chatting to a service manager at a Suzuki dealership where I bought my last lot, he said that they really rate it and that it had got them over quite a few problems.
They do a full range of additives to get over lots of different problems and have a technical back up team although I am not sure if Joe public can use this.

Have a look here http://www.forteuk.co.uk/

 

[wireman]

There might be a problem with Slick or any other teflon loaded material in a fuel system.
I am not certain of this but my warning goes like this:-

Teflon has a fluoron based component which will degrade into hydrofluoric acid if heated past 400 degrees or so, an internal combustion engine passes 400 deg by a mile or two.

HF is probably the nastiest compound around, it eats through glass and disolves steel, hands, lungs etc etc in no time, you need tons of water to dilute it to a safer level and several people have been badly injured by it.

This also applies to teflon pipe tape which can produce very small solid particles in the air, using heat to work on plumbing which has thread tape applied can produce HF vapours which will cause some internal damage if you breath it into your lungs.

Treat it with respect and teflon is superb however not enough is commonly known about its nasty side.

PS flexi brake hoses use fluorinated components dont burn them whilst welding or cutting up old cars.

 

[Myros]

I seem to remember from schoolboy chemistry

that Teflon only reacted with molten sodium at over 1200 deg C. I shall have to google the space-age wonder product and see what I have forgotten.

I have slick 50-ed all my engines since the early 80's. No damage observed.
My BMW 1.8 was 190,000miles up when it was written off. The engine never had to have any work done on it original cams, followers, rings, bearings, the whole shebang. It used no more oil then than when I bought it at 40,000.

 

[entropymatters]

I thought you were supposed to flush the engine oil with slick 50. So you would add it shortly before draining and replacing the oil. Do they make a fuel additive as well?
I only ask because I put some in a Beetle once and never drained it. Shortly afterwards, the rings on one piston disintegrated. It still ran, but used a lot of oil. In fact it ran for weeks until I could afford a new set of pistons, rings and cylinders.

 

[Dave's E55 AMG]

I've always used the STP additive, I used it in many petrol engines - it's been great for cleaning the injectors.