water treatment for valves???

[tkent02]

I don't want to make a recomendation on this but I'll give up some personal expirience.

I had a 1976 Glastron runabout with a straight six chevy blocked motor. Great running old girl and fun on the water. One day as I was doing some pre M and this started with changing some old plugs. I had noticed some hesitation and was just trying to establish a baseline. I did a compression test on the motor with all the plugs out of the block. As I turned the motor over I noticed some liquid (water) misting into one of the cylinders. I stuck my trusty led bendable flashlight into the said cylinder and found it to be spotlessly clean. Carbon in every other and a little build up on the piston crowns. This one had nothing, again spotless.
Time to change the headgasket. Once that was done it looked like all the others and the plug was the same color. Hesitation gone.

Moral of the story. IMHE water will clean the carbon out of a cylinder, very well. Like anything we do thats not procedure in the manual, you run a risk. I'm also wondering if the people who told you this weren't going back to the two-stroke days when carbon really was a huge problem and you had to de-carbon things all the time.

my .02

Suzuki Water Buffalo, BMW M30 car engine, couple others I have seen with a small leak of water into the combustion chamber, that cylinder was spotless, looked brand new. Since then I have let a quart or two of water suck into the port where you hook manometers to a bike engine while driving down the road to clean out the pistons, it does clean them. I just do this before a teardowm to make cleaning pistons and heads easier, or to fix an engine which has problems with detonation, which can be caused by carbon buildup. You can't hydrolock it as only a few droplets are going through the cylinder at once, the engine is already running and up to operating temperature before I turn on the water. I don't think it reduces the piston temps much, certainly not enough to damage anything, IMHO.

It seems to work fine, I have seen no damage from it.

[spchips]

Water injection works very poorly in a naturally aspirated engine.

However in a turbo diesel, turbo or supercharged gas engine, it has a very beneficial effect, allowing you to boost HP/lower charge pressures.

Water injection works because of the evaporative cooling effect of the water as it sprays into the intake tract. When sprayed into hot boosted air, it has the same effect as an intercooler, only more so. You can col the air to below the ambient air temperature. When the air is cooled, it becomes more dense, allowing you to create more power for a given boost pressure, or alternately lowering your boost pressure for the same amount of power.

In my previous life I sold spray nozzles, and one of our customers was Devils Own Injection, where they sell it for diesel engines.

[BIKERTUCKER]

tkent02: I had a 650 Silverwing that let me know I had a head gasket problem by the right side spark plug looking better than new. You got me to wondering how you carried water and container while riding?? I was thinking old peanut butter jar with hose in saddle bag.

[don]

I can vouch for the following with extenceive experience:

yes it works

yes it fractures the carbon off due to the high temp differance

yes a large chunck can get smashed in the cylinder

yes a large chunck can get smashed by a closeing valve in the seat (then leak and burn the valve and/or the seat)

But,

If you are only looking to get a " clean resting valve" for accurate measurement, the same tecnique is still used today at dealerships all over. They don't use water though, they use what essentially is kerosene. We used to use water, kero, Marvel mystery oil, thinned out motor oil with gasoline. The gist is to flood the hot valve bowls with an oily solvent. Kind of like they do at engine shops that do hot chemical bioling on engine blocks etc.

Long wind short......yes it works and if there is significant buildup yes it can be real bad.