Originally Posted by Touring5
Originally Posted by Falcon_LS
I have two sets of injectors for every vehicle I own; the factory set and a flow matched set. As part of preventive maintenance, whenever I do a tune up, the old injectors are packaged and sent to Trav for cleaning and inspection. He cleans them on an ASNU machine, replaces the basket filters, individually inspects the injectors for flow and spray pattern, seals them up for storage, packages and mails them back to me.
This is the idea I originally posted about. I've read a number of accounts of situations like Trav mentioned - degraded spray pattern, matching, not causing poor operation but enough to make the owner just figure it's "an old engine". I also mentioned the MAF. I've seen video's of a guy with an M5 that they did a dyno run on - it was was making about 15% below expected power but not running terrible or setting codes. They disconnected the MAF, did another run, and saw improvement with the engine using failsafe mappings. Then they put a new MAF in and saw even better performance.
I've considered doing it with my BMW because of it's age and tendency to sit (truly a "garage queen"). Being an inline 6, getting at the fuel rails/injectors/intake appears to be reasonably easy given the layout. Unless something has changed, the cost for the service seems quite reasonable (very minor compared to a lot of the "upgrades" some add on older cars). The biggest issue seems to be having the car out of service for a week or so (and having to pull and replace the injectors).
To Trav: you mentioned "rehash" job. I assume you meant to get your injectors cleaned and returned, not a trade like a reman/core purchase. BTW it appears my car uses a Siemens/VDO injector (current P/N A2C59511971) - what would be the price to recondition (6) of them?
Exactly clean what you know are functioning, you end with a better result than a bunch of different mileage cleaned units. These particular Siemens/VDO injectors IIRC use the Bosch internals and may possibly be rebadged. The Siemens units are generally plastic and VDO doesn't make injectors (I honestly don't know if they ever did, they were more of a gauge manufacturer) just buys and rebadges like SMP, not necessarily a bad thing, some of the SMP units are pretty decent and even some OE.