My BMW E90 320d has been around since 2012 and this year I celebrate 11 years of ownership of it. Overall it has almost reached a total mileage of 180k km in total (yes, very little for an 11 year old car) and since then I have been slowly maintaining it little bit little. One of the items that I have always wanted to do is to perform an engine cleaning on it without overhauling the entire engine. When I researched numerous methods, one method came to mind which is walnut blasting.
Walnut blasting is a method in which you would blast pieces of walnut through in order to clean the intake valves of your engine. In case you are curious about what walnut blasting is, check out this link to find out more about it.
After a quick Google search to allow the advertisers to track my query (yes, I search so that cookies will know what I am searching for), I went on social media to see which advertisements would pop-up. Once one came up, I dropped them a WhatsApp message and the next thing I know, I made an appointment to have the N47 diesel engine walnut blasted.
I drove all the way to Puchong in order to meet with Aaron whom I contacted via WhatsApp. He was very informative and explained the process to me. So after 15mins, I dropped the car off there and then went off to work.
After an hour of cleaning up my dirty engine bay, the techs managed to get a scope into my engine to show me the current conditions (as seen in the photos above). It wasn’t too terrible considering that I did have a mixture of both Euro 2 and Euro 5 diesels over the years.
He proceeded to continue with the cleaning process and after a good 4 hours, the difference was truly night and day. Check them out below.
On top of that, they helped me clean my intake manifold and helped me replace the gasket as well.
Conclusion
All-in-all, the whole process was as expected. I got a cleaner engine which did give me a bit of a placebo feel that there was some improvements. Logically speaking, to me its just preventative maintenance and doing once every 11 years doesn’t seem so bad! If you are interested in exploring walnut blasting for your car, feel free to contact Aaron at +60178985315. The total cost for the walnut blasting alone for my BMW E90 320d was RM650 (not including the intake manifold gasket).
Do note that there are numerous ways and methods that people have been offering to clean these parts of the engine. Some use chemicals, some use special oxygen and some use other methods. I feel that none is better than the other and I was just curious about trying out walnut blasting instead. Please note that you can also do walnut blasting for both petrol and diesel vehicles.
