Forgetting the borderline scams that were slick50 and the like, do any of the myriad of oil and fuel additives that are sold have ANY use other than lining the pockets of their manufacturers?
I am specifically referring to Sea Foam, Lucas, Marvel Mystery Oil and Berryman B12 Chemtool.
Would you use them in your car? I realize that they do not perform the magic they claim but do they provide any maintenance value to your engine such as cleaning O2 sensors? Or do you end up with more harm than good?
Seafoam is what I use added to the gas tank to clean injectors as a fuel additive. It is probably over priced and there are other products, but I use it. Techron and other additives work just as well.
If you think that you have engine crud build up you can pour it into your oil and run it for a brief period and then change the oil out. I have done this once and the oil came out really black, but I change my oil often enough that I don’t think this is really beneficial to me, might be to someone else.
The third use of Seafoam, which it do not support, is to pull off your brake booster hose and pour it in until the engine stalls out. Then when you restart it the neighborhood is filled with a cloud of smoke that many think is stuff being cleaned out of your top end. This doesn’t really work because of poor distribution throughout the intake manifold. A better product for that is Mopar’s combustion chamber cleaner because it is a foam. And probably no one really needs to use either if they change their oil, but it might be something you want to do when buying a used car with unknown maintenance history.
Again, I just use Seafoam as a gas additive/fuel system cleaner in my gas tank.
If you would like to read endless arguments about Seafoam on car nut boards I can point you to several.
The real deal for fuel deposit additives are ones containing a class of compounds called polyether amines. This is what the classic Chevron “Techron” additive is composed of. Gumout Regane and (IIRC) Redline’s fuel system cleaner also have fairly high concentrations of these additives.
Oil additives aren’t recommended in general- the general idea being that if there was something that would lower wear, improve economy, reduce friction, or whatever, then the oil manufacturers would include that ingredient in the oil and charge a hair more, rather than let the additive makers capture that extra revenue.
Beyond that, modern engines and oils can easily go 200k miles or more with regular mfg-specified interval changes. No need for 3k changes, special additives, or anything esoteric.
I’ve used Sea Foam and Techron especially on older vehicles. Techron is suppose to be good for carbon deposits on valves, pistons, and combustion chambers.
However you can prevent a lot of these problems by using a quality gasoline in the first place. Check out the Top Tier Gasoline site for a good list.
Oil additives are mostly bogus IMHO. Same goes for transmission and cooling system additives. Their one use may be as a last ditch effort to prevent oil burning, make a transmission shift, or stop leaks.
Most additives are worthless. The only one that I feel works is Mystery Oil-it will dissolve sludge deposits in a neglected engine. The real mystery about these products is how long many of them have been around-“Casite” has been sold since the 1930’s. Many oil additives date from a time when oils were non-detergent, and a “valve job” was routine at about 15,000 miles. Those days (thankfully) are long gone. But the manufacturers of this stuff have made a fortune from them!:smack:
Kind of a imely thread for me. Just had the head rebuilt on the volkswagen. valves in one cylinder weren’t sealing at all and the head gasket was bad and…well all kinds of stuff, really, and it has 150,000 or so miles. I’ve left the block alone because I don’t feel like pulling it if I don’t have to and the head was bad enough to account for some oil consumption, but based on the other stuff…any recommendations for maybe, I dunno, de-glopping the crank case? Or is that something that’s not likely necessary?
do you even know whether or not your “crankcase” is “gloppy?”
this is the problem I have with additive-peddling charlatans. they rely on the fact that the rubes to whom they market their snake oil don’t know enough about their equipment to even begin to understand what said snake oil does.