My "check engine" light came on last week saying "Increased Emissions!" This was after my adding a DDM Street Cold Air Intake. I was a bit afraid that MAG would ding me on this, but thankfully they claimed that the issue was independent of that. They cleaned out my valves with a walnut shell blast and reprogrammed my car to ensure that "this won't happen again in another 28K miles." Nice to know that MAG is looking out for me. ;-) I took the opportunity to have them replace my warped "S" scoop while I was there. I opted for a chrome scoop replacement and this is the result: Pretty nice, if I do say so myself.
Like the chrome, but it will warp and drip too, if they didn't install the heat shield. Speaking from experience, we were on our 3rd when they finally got the heat shield in, now all is good!
Was that walnut shell blast a complicated operation? Seems like they would need to remove both the intake and exhaust systems to do it. How long was it in the shop?
I actually had the heat shield installed by Way Motor Works at the Dragon. I don't know if you can notice, but I also had MINI Fini install a chrome scoop grill at the Dragon as well.
They told me that they only had to blast out the intake, not the exhaust system. I had read horror stories that the exhaust gets it too, but hopefully I won't see the check engine light again... The whole procedure took two days. I think half of the second day was spent reprogramming the car. I really don't understand why it takes so long. Do they still use cassette tapes??
Nope the programing is all on 5 1/4 disks, they got tired of people getting confused when no music played from the CD's and when the Yanni tune was applied the engines were killing themselves at a high rate.
I'm still trying to get my head around how they did the carbon cleaning.... If they removed the head, OK..... But if they left the head on, wouldn't some of the walnut shells pass through the head, turbo, and then plug up the cat?
They used to do this on Audis back in the day.....they do pull the manifolds and rotate the engine till the valves are closed, then it's a lot like sand blasting.....then just blow the remaining dust/shells out with air. I guess the shells are fine enough that whatever remains gets burned up in the combustion process, as i never heard of any problems with it on Audis, and they always ran considerably better after having this done - but they were having a real problem with coking of the valves - I don't remember if it was a seal problem or a breather problem on the Audi engines now - it's been too long. On the MINIs they're just doing the intake side, no reason to remove the exhaust that I can see...