Another piston soak "success"

Just wanted to share my experience with the *new to me* remedy for some people who have had the common issue of oil consumption/burning. I'll start by saying that anyone here hoping this is your go-to answer, you should explore the more common problems like pcv valve, bad turbo, etc.

For context, I have a 2007 speed3 with 155k on the clock with a BNRs3, 3.5' intake and all of the supporting mods like a PERM pcv plate, Corksport catch can, etc. Turned by Will at PD tuning.

For a about a year now I have slowly noticed some smoking issues intermittently but nothing that was consistent enough to be alarming. Nothing was consistency causing the smoke so I didn't think too much of it. Within the past few months though I installed the BNRs3 with a catless downpipe and had noticed a good amount of whiteish-blue smoke while either downshifting/engine braking and on lighter load like taking off from a stop. Wide open throttle pulls also appeared as if I was running pig rich and left a huge cloud of dark colored smoke. I was having to top off the oil every few hundred miles. I went through all of the typical failures that would cause this and did not have any success fixing the problem. Compression test came back with not amazing results of: 140-145-135-140. Nothing to be alarmed of though with this mileage. I decided it couldn't hurt to try the top end cleaner/piston soak that I have seen here and there on this forum and reddit. I'm glad I did. Let me remind you that I did all of the regular checks before the turbo and downpipe install and everything seemed normal. So this had me scratching my head a bit.

So, I figured i'd take a shot at this regardless of the results. It's pretty simple as long as you have space, time, and roughly $30. I grabbed 3 12oz cans of B-12 Chemtool in the non spray can form from Autozone. I'm not going to walk you through how to get the point of removing the spark plugs, I would hope you know how to do that if you're reading this. From there it's very simple. Start by pouring roughly 4oz of the chemtool to make sure you fully saturate the surface area. You do not need to fill the cylinder. From this point on all you're doing is waiting roughly 4-6 hours for the chemical to break down all of the crap and top off as needed, as well as hand cranking the motor (clockwise) one full revolution. I started the process on friday night around 6pm and finished on sunday at 12pm.

Once I had put everything back together, I had to sit and crank the motor for roughly 5 minutes before it fired up and blew a nice cloud of white smoke. Some people have let there car get to full temp and drive for around 30 minutes but I didn't feel comfortable doing this with all of the B-12 in the oil. I let it idle for a few minutes then drove it to the end of the street and back until the smoke subsided. After the short drive I came back and drained the oil and filled with pennzoil ultra platinum 5w-30 and will likely do another oil change just as a precaution in a few days.

Since the oil change I have zero smoking issues on decel or take-off, minimal smoke at wot, and no oil consumption whatsoever. I will be doing another oil change this weekend as well as new spark plugs and will provide compression test results. As far as I can tell though, this simple procedure may have added a couple more years of use to this motor.

 

Always glad to see when the soaks work for someone, worth a try for 30$ and some time. Others aren't so fortunate

 

Might have to give this a shot on my lawn tractor

 

This is not the soaking I was expecting, but hey, this is a good finding!!

 

If you’re lucky I’ll post my other soaking thread in the NSFW section