Intake at 38k miles

[shorod]

My wife and I have had this EcoBoost MKT for about the last 5k miles so I'm not really sure what kind of service, if any, the engine and fuel system has had. I'm guessing not much. Since the A/C in the garage has it pretty comfortable, and I just got done cleaning under the hood of my wife's MKT, I decided to pull a couple of spark plugs and see how they look since there's 38k miles on the car now. The two I pulled (cyl 4 and 6) look great, so then I decided to run the borescope down the plug hole to see how the top of the piston looks. To me, it looks pretty good with only minimal carbon.


I then removed what I think is a MAP sensor on the top of the intake to scope the intake and valves. I've read about the catch can concerns for the GTDI engine so I wanted to see if there's much merit to the concern. I'm no expert here, but I'm not seeing a need, at least not by 38k miles.






-Rod

[shorod]

I did a SeaFoam treatment on the MKT this afternoon and there was definitely more carbon in there than I realized. Afterwards I scoped a few intake valves and the piston top again and there's a noticeable improvement. While some carbon still shows up in the intake manifold it's so soft that a good drive will likely burn it out. The carbon goo was coating the borescope camera after scoping the intake.

Here's how the exhaust filled my garage after the SeaFoam application:


And here's one of the intake valves, shiny clean:


Now the top of piston #6, notice the carbon build up around the edge is gone today:


And finally a close up of the center top of the piston. The machining marks are even visible:


-Rod