The instructor of my “Aircraft Systems For Pilots” class says that running half a tank of 100 low lead through my Maxima engine every once in a while would clean it out real nice. Just remove the cat converter and take her down to the drag strip and run her hard and hot. The high-grade solvents in the aviation fuel really do the trick. Since our compression ratio is 10:1 there won’t be any performance increase, but I'm thinking it is worth the time to clean out all the gunk in the engine. I have easy access to the 100LL, I refuel planes all the time down at the local airport so I figure why the hell not. I trust everything out of that mechanics mouth, hell he works on the planes that I fly, I trust him with my life. What is your guy's thoughts on it? A better alternative to gas additives?

 

Try it and get back to us with the results!

 

seems like alot of work to remove the cat each time you want to "clean" out your motor.

 

It works pretty nice, a good friend of my Dad is the plant manager at Boeing air field and 'tops off' every now and then

I should give him some gas cans for me to use

 

I have a warpspeed test pipe that I would use to bypass the Cat if I were to do it. It takes only minutes to take it off, no problema.

 

The gunk build up is mostly in the intake system and some carbon in the EGR path, not the combustion chambers. The fuel never sees the air intake path that needs to be cleaned and it's already burnt by the time it gets to the EGR path.

You'll get better performance gains by cleaning the intake system over a fuel or fuel additive cleaner.

 

Save yourself the time, hassle, and money and just get a BG product cleansing once every 30-40K miles if your that worried about it. It will work much better than anything else out there.

 

yup.. don't bother... plus the 100LL isn't exactly "low lead"... too much of it and it will eat your O2 sensors up. $$$ouch$$$

 

I though any lead will kill o2's instantly.

 

not exactly..

as I said, 100LL isn't "low lead" compared to regular 93 octane unleaded, but it's still low compared to 110 leaded race fuel.

Assuming you ran 100LL in your car all the time, your O2 sensors would last weeks instead of years.. it's not an instant death, but it will eventually ruin them..

I have lots of Supra/Z32 friends that run 100LL in their cars when they go to the track or dragstrip... when they're done, they drain the tank if there's a lot, or if they're almost empty, they just refill with 93 octane and keep going.. so far they haven't killed any O2s that I know of, but I'm sure it's decreasing the life of them (just like second hand smoke.... hard to prove the damage, but you gotta know it's happening)

 

Cool to see some pilots on the org. What are you flying, license are you working on? IM working on my commercial single engine now flying a piper arrow not feeling it but its a change of pace from a C-172. BTW I put 100ll in my rx7 all the time love that smell.

 

Or you could just run without the cat all the time.

 

why? that is retarded.