Valve cleaning on a D4 VEA

[Drunk]

Hi guys, so since my car is gonna hit 200'000 km's soon, I decided to do some maintenance and de-carbon my intake manifold, as well as the intake ports & valves. I replaced the EGR-valve not so long ago and cleaned the EGR-cooler, so this was a natural next step.

I started by removing the intake manifold, which took me about 45 mins, it's an easy thing to remove. You can keep the throttle body on it, just have to remove some fuel hoses, a few other bits and I had to remove the high-pressure rail line to the diesel pump, this will become relevant later.

The intake manifold honestly didn't look too bad, I tried to scrape most of the stuff out using some picks, a screwdrivers and mixture of brake-clean and some carburetor cleaner. In the end i power-washed it with water, scraped some more, blew out the water and let it dry in the sun, while I did the valves.

The intake ports were not as bad as I thought, I've seen a lot of worse on some Ford/PSA motors with a lot less mileage.

I cleaned the valves using a valve clean system from TUNAP, I think they might be a from Switzerland. You spray a granulate inside the intake ports which removes the dirt and you suck it out with a vacuum cleaner. The leftover particles can be removed by spraying a solvent inside, the granulate dissolves in it immediately.

The entire process took about 2h, after that I prepped everything to put it back together and was up and running another 1h later. This all went pretty smooth, the only thing I messed up was I didn't tighten the HP fuel rail line good enough on the rail and it sprayed diesel everywhere during my test-drive. Had to re-tighten it and wash the engine bay.

All in all, it was pretty easy and the kit I used from TUNAP is pretty good.
If anybody wonders what parts you need, order a intake manifold gasket, as well as the gasket for the throttle body (if you're gonna remove it) and maybe the HP rail-line to the HP-pump, since those are technically 1-time-use. It might be possible to remove the manifold without touching that line, but then you would have to remove the electric motor for butterly valves inside the manifold, and I wasn't to keen on that.

Here are some pictures of my work, sorry for not doing enough "after" pictures, I was trying to get this done quickly.

[monkeh]

Good job!
I'd voice my opinion that all diesel EGR needs to die. Coming from an egr deleted (but dpf still enabled) past, the egr death on my v60 is next.
On the d5 engine, the egr is very grim.

[scissors]

Excellent write up, thanks for sharing. I was expecting it to look much worse!

[Sotosound]

What was the condition of the valve stem oil seals?