FD3S Steam Clean Thread
 

Alright, I know there are a lot of opinions and many have different instructions. I think this topic should be a "sticky" once a good guide is made. Now I have yet to do this, but hope to do my first Steam Clean in the next couple days. I have been reading older threads and trying to come up with what I am going to do. So from readings here is what I have come up with, I am open to input but trying to create a general guide. Also wanting to double check the locations of input.

What you need:
*Vacuum line ( just a couple feet required)
-A T joint is optional if you wish to do both rotors at once, simply to tie the two into the same line

*Oil for an oil change shortly after
-Not instant, burn out as much of the water as you can, perhaps a short drive, but change the oil later in the day or at least the same week.

* A Friend or observer
-It's not asking much and can save from other problems! Checking for heat from the Exhaust and the DP directly seem to be a primary concern. He could also Control the accelerator pedal so you can watch for problems or just focus on feeding water. Heck grab two friends if you want.

* Gloves
- Lost of members have just grabbed the throttle cable to keep the constant RPM(Use of a helper can use the accelerator as mentioned above).Now I do not know what is "IDEAL" for the RPM, the general seems to be 2500-4000. I am going to aim for ~3000.

*Distilled Water
- Once again from the readings have found several different answers. The normal seems to been anywhere from 0.5 Gallon to 1 gallon per rotor. (For the Canadians like me this works out to... 1.9L to 3.8L {for simplicity a pepsi bottle or a 4L milk jug}).


So now you know the basics of what you need, here is how to go about doing so!

1) Gather the required stuff and think about your plans, instruct your helper ETC.
2) Start the engine and remove the first Vacuum line (remove both if you have a T connection). Ad on your new vacuum line used to suck the water soon, kink the line and place it in the distilled water
3) Keep the throttle constant, either via the throttle cable or helper on the accelerator pedal
4) Un-kink the Vacuum line and allow the distilled water to be sucked into the engine
5) Again keep throttle constant, the car may begin to struggle and have a "rough" time, no worries, just do what it takes to keep a constant throttle
6) Have your helper (or if you are available) walk around, check under the car for heat, check the exhaust tip for heat, check the engine bay for smoke that should not be there. Be a "supervisor". Keep doing this during the whole process!
7) Continue this process until the amount of distilled water is all gone
8) You can now place the original vacuum line(s) to the appropriate position
9) The idle should slowly become less and less of a struggle to maintain, as it eases up, ease off the throttle, just don't let it stall
10) Let run and idle for ~10 minutes after just to clean all excess water in the engine.
11)***REPEAT on the second rotor if you did not use a T splitter***

12) So now the engine has been steam cleaned, and "most" water has left the engine. Go for a short drive, 5-10 minutes should be good just to further clean things up and get rid of any unwanted water
13) you are done :-)

14) Later that day once things have cooled, or ATLEAST laster in the week, change your oil! Yes we have made an effort to get rid of all excess water, let us go one step further and replace the oil! Lots have stated in their experiences their oil is gross and needs a change, just do it, a minor job and does not take long, no need to risk it! Hope your car runs better and who knows maybe you will be a lucky one who gets an insane compression increase that holds!


Hopefully this could become a sticky, would be awesome! Feel free to post comments and or changes you feel are required. If you have experience post your results!


P.S. I have linked a picture of the UIM and the Vacuum lines. This is the one part I am not 100% sure on, could someone please circle the two lines required? Thank you kindly!

Water is roughly 15 times as dense as air/fuel.
I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to ask your engine to try to compress water.

The cleaning properties of water, even heated to steam are not very impressive.

Here it is..
Attachment 716557

I had great results after steam cleaning my engine for the first time. Pulled more vacuum at idle and ran smoother. I've seen other peoples results in slightly higher compression as well.

my engine ran better and compression went up about 5psi after steam cleaning.

I don't think you can really hydro-lock a rotary like you could a piston engine. It's an effective way to decarbon.
But with the development of relatively inexpensive AI systems it seems like they offer that along with other benefits. And since it's more gradual/continuous it would have less risk.

I had a fresh rebuild and water injection. I did a steam clean and my vacuum increased. I adjusted the throttle screw to hover around 3,000. That allowed me to watch the exhaust myself.

To add to this thread. Steam clean interval should be twice a year or every 6 months. Steam cleaning will also clean the o2 sensors and cat converter so they last longer.

I have 1st hand experience doing this for many thousands of miles. You can't hydro-lock a rotary. Also I had been doing the steam cleaning thing on my Fd ever since I owned it (bought it with 60k). The original engine lasted to 108k before it blew due to over boosting. My vehicle was mostly granny driven so carbon build-up should have been hellacious. When I tore the engine down, the carbon build-up inside my engine was well managed. Even at this mileage there was enough compression on the front rotor to allow me to still start and drive the vehicle 15 miles home with a completely blown rear rotor. Steam cleaning may not be impressive but what it will do it help keep combustion seals grooves nice and clean so they have less chance of sticking. When you make more compression, you have less chance of flooding. There are more benefits than you realize. ;)

I was about to change my oil when i see that post, so i deceided to go with a moderate steam clean. I do it with 2 liter per rotor of distillated water.

Everything go fine untill i finished and let it idle for about 15min. Now i have litle blue smoke on idle and a lot when i'm driving. I just hope i dont blew an oil seal and it is just my high flow cat that clean itself:(

Tomorrow i will make a long trip to see if it is just some risidue stuck in my exhaust line!!

This is exactly why I wouldn't advise doing things like this.
I'm not worried about hydrolocking the engine, I'm worried about raising pressure on the combustion faces and seals.
I blew the rings on a jetski once after rolling it, because compressing water isn't what the seals were designed for.

The combustion pressures while doing the steam cleaning wont reach anywhere near what it does under boost under normal driving situations. Your examples prove you don't have any rotary related experience in this particular issue. Many have proven that this is effective. Piston engine related problems have absolutely nothing to do with what happens inside a rotary. The steam cleaing thing has been done on rotarys for years.

Does the water have any negative effects on the cat?

Did you ever change your oil afterwards? Unfortunately rotarys by design have a lot more blow by than piston engines. I'll educate you a little. Ever wonder why the oil always smells like fuel? It's the natural design flaw of the combustion chamber and rotary compression seals. On the compression stroke, each side of a rotor has a total of 6 blow by locations (4 at the side seal corner seal area and each apex seal to rotor groove). Once the fuel mixture gets pass this point the last line of defense is the oil control o-rings. Those rings are only designed to keep the THICKER oil from invading the combustion area. So fuel will dilute into the oil system. On boosted rotarys it's even worse because you have more combustion pressure. More pressure equals more blow by hence more fuel dilution and more frequent oil changes. Same goes for engines with too much step wear on the side plates. With steam cleaning, the same thing is happening. Steam vapor will blow past all the seals in the same manor as fuel. The difference is, the vapor will condense back into water in the oil system. When the oil thins out, it will find more leaks from worn seals. This is why you ALWAYS change the oil after doing the steam cleaning.

In my case no! My cat had 108k and when I removed it during the engine pull, the honeycomb was very white and fully intact. My exhaust never had any bad odors. My engine also blew with the stock cat in place from over boosting. To me that says the cat was flowing very well. ;)

you guys ever heard about adding trans fluid into the water, to steam clean the engine, some1 told me that it very effective as far as cleaning/ as well as lubricating seals while doing this steaming procedure.

Thank for the info but i know exactly what you mean and i change my oil in the next hour after the steam clean! I don't want to say that my motor is broke because of steam clean, i just have a lot of smoke after that and i hope that it will disapear after a long trip. For your info i change my oil every 3000km with brad penn and K&N oil filter.

I will give feedback in this week on my over-fume :)

I'd love to see your math about the combustion pressure claim.
The quick math I've done leads me to believe that even a 5th of the chamber being water instead of air has over double the combustion pressure of the normal mixture under 10psi of boost. I admit that my math was really quick and rough. But again, water doesn't compress nearly as well as air.

The issue of causing damage comes into play with how much water is entering the chamber at a time. If it's drawing a single cc per stroke, it's not going to be a problem. If it's drawing 100cc per stroke, it could be catastrophic.

ATF works to break down carbon and at the same time will increase compression in an engine. It will also smoke like a forest fire for a while.

I know you mean well but you keep taking this to the extremes. There's only so much water that can be sucked in with rotary engine vacuums ranging from 11-18". Also at this vacuum there is only so much water that can be sucked through those tinny nipples. To my knowledge I have not heard of a singe person blowing a rotary after doing this properly. Now if someone uses the larger brake booster line is a totally different storey. Now as far as numbers, maybe I could convince Barry Bordes to do a little test for us. He has the capability to measure rotary combustion pressures. ;)

I'm not taking this to any extreme. I'm trying to prevent people from doing damage when people that haven't properly studied the risks claim the procedure is safe.
How long does it take to empty the gallon jug? How many combustion cycles have occurred per rotor for that gallon? This will tell us how much water is entering the chamber per cycle, which will allow us to do the math and measure combustion pressure. My rough math says it wont take a lot of water to make a whole lot of extra pressure. I'm positive the apex, side and corner seals weren't made for it, are you positive that the pressure doesn't exceed their limits?

800rpm x 2 events per rpm x 10 minutes = 16000 combustion events
2,000cc/16000events = .125cc/event

.125cc of water for a 654cc volume is a whisper on a scream

Like t-von told you, this has been done forever by everyone, water injection is well explored. No risk. Great returns. End of story.

tell you what, i work on RX7s daily and do decarbs on them fairly often.

i inject as much water as i can. just enough to keep the engine from stalling at about 1500-2k RPMs, sometimes too much water gets injected and the engine stalls. how many blown motors do you think have been a result of stalling the engine with too much water injection? none, zero, nil.

now lets move on to the cars i've installed water/methanol/alcohol injection onto with up to 1300cc's of water injection. want to know how much carbon came out of the water injected motors? 0, none, zero, nada, zilch. yes, they were as clean as the day i assembled the motors. so if you want to keep bugging people in this thread talking about how water has no cleaning characteristics or how it will blow a motor up, well, have fun with it but i will say your claims are from a piston lover trying to create hystery from commonailities in rotary engine practice.

next you'll be saying that 2 stroke oil in the fuel promotes carbon buildup..

i will say that it could hurt marginal oil seals with this treatment such as in Erix example. but i will also tell you that if his oil seals did go out due to this treatment that his oil seals were due to crack and leak anyways because they are simple rubber and cracked due to the shock of the water hitting them on a hot engine. basically telling me that his oil seals were well over 10 years old and probably original. am i wrong?


i worry more about the exhaust overheating and catching things on fire than actually hurting these engines with a water steam cleaning treatment.

this certainly isn't for me to try and get people to blow up motors either otherwise i would probably include a disclaimer that sais that this treatment may be unsafe and you do it at your own risk, blah blah.. but, who cares because it's not going to happen unless someone finds a way to inject half a gallon in 2 seconds somehow, i've tried various ports and injected more faster certain ways than others but none of the methods resulted in any engine damage at all.

about the only way to damage a rotary with this process is to remove your intake duct and aim a garden hose on full spray at the throttle body. and well, if you do that then you deserve a blown motor.

If it takes the full 10 minutes to do 2 liters, then yeah it's not going to be a problem. I would say that it's entirely dependent on how much water is being pulled into the motor at a time.

Water doesn't have hardly any cleaning properties, no more so than any other fluid, but that's besides the point.
To say I'm a piston lover is insane and you're talking out of your ass, aside from people here that are currently flipping RX-7s, I'd wager that my 30+ rotary powered cars is more than 99% of the board.

I'm not trying to create hysteria. I'm trying to make sure that people understand that compressing water in an engine is not a good idea. You can claim that you're not pulling in enough water to do any damage, and that might be true. But you're also not offering to replace damaged engines if your claim is wrong.

Where in the original post was a disclaimer? Where was the "i will say that it could hurt marginal oil seals with this treatment" statement? How soon were his seals going to fail? Can you say without a doubt that this procedure didn't just cost him a rebuild?

Back to my point. This is being posted as a risk proof how-to, and people are to believe that this should be done. There are plenty of products that can remove carbon deposits just as well, but they too have their own risks. Much like back in the day when the big list was advising people to remove the ASTs, delete their main cats etc...