Originally Posted By: chad8
I have an 03 taurus with the vulcan and I was diagnosing a 97 duratec today. If you go on tcca and look , there is not all that much intake or dirty valve problems on these cars except the throttle plates and the stupidly designed egr pressure sensor. At your mileage , I wouldn't be overly concerned.
On my taurus I have used pri-g and have used lucas ucl too.I think I used B-g once . I get the stuff free from a mechanic friend. My car has about 40000 miles. A $2 bottle of shell v-power or regaine won't hurt either. The rest is just over kill on a low mileage vehicle like yours. I will say that I like costco gasoline which is actually b-p. or speedway/ marathon .
As far as someone mentioning lubrication of fuel pumps is not happening, you best do a bit more study on the subject in terms of cleaning , cooling, and lubricating a fuel system including a pump. You were not entirely wrong ,but even "sealed" pumps do benefit from some lube in the corrosive environment they live. .
Yes the throttle plate and the body around the plate was very dirty. Cleaning that up quietened the idle significantly.
The car had seen a lot of short journeys for a couple of years and a lack of top tier fuel which I think has aged everything beyond it's 66k miles. It's had frequent and quality oil changes with original filters but clearly that hasn't been enough.
The good news is that the car has definitely improved. The smoother idle and acceleration is because of the throttle body and plate cleaner, but the car also seems to have more power, which must be because some of the intake cleaner entered the system (the in tank cleaner hasn't worked it's way entirely through the system and is quite weak in terms of PEA%). I just can't tell what % of the intake cleaner was used and how much was wasted.
One thing I would expect is that if the throttle body and plate is that dirty and that is a result of blowback from the engine, then the rest of the intake should be as bad.
In that case, you would want to use a cleaner that starts as close to the throttle body plate as possible.
Which is why I was thinking about getting the Walmart treatment. To be sure that I've cleaned the intake. In any case, I'm going to let the in tank cleaner work it's way through, and then take it from there, probably add some Regane first. Right now, the acceleration, while improved, still feels rough so I think the first step is to use something like Regane to see if that completes the job.
