Re: Use of Sea Foam
seafoam claims to work on the oiled surfaces, by adding 1/3 can to the oil (which is then changed), and on the combustion chambers, by pouring 1/3 can into the carb and 1/3 into the fuel. old timers have warned me to be VERY careful about using this stuff, that using it wrong could damage the seal of the rings.
but i don't discount all additives as "snake oil". i have a 35 year old mercruiser 140 i/o which had idling problems. reset the timing, adjusted the carb, checked fuel pressure, had the carb and choke rebuilt--things helped a little but never quite right. so i did what some of the old timers said--stay away from seafoam in the carb and run a treatment or two of techron through, in a tank of gas. i did that and the engine idled so much better. i also had hesitation on accelerating out of the hole, and between rebuilding the carb and the techron, it's gone.
now i NEVER believed in any of this stuff--"snake oil" would've been the kindest term i may have used. but using the techron changed my mind. i now run it through my boat once a season, and through my trucks once every year or two.
i did have a use for seafoam that helped, though. i recently had low oil pressure on my 140. because of poor access in the bilge, i had been sucking the oil changes out the dipstick tube. last year i spent a long time at it, turning the tube around and trying to move it all over the pan bottom, and i sucked some old gunk out. modern oils shouldn't produce that stuff (i run only mercruiser 25w-40), so that stuff is most likely in there from the previous owners--who knows what they ran. anyway, i was convinced the screen on the oil pump was clogged and i didn't want to pull the pan, so i did a modified seafoam treatment. i warmed the engine, put 1/3 can seafoam into the old oil, ran for a few minutes, shut down, sat a few minutes, then drained the oil into the bilge through the hard to reach drain plug. then i filled it and ran it twice with some new basic oil, drained each time to get all the seafoam out. then changed the filter, filled with 25w-40 and test ran it--i got my oil pressure back.
a lot of people claimed that synthetic oils were snake oil, but today it's mostly accepted that they outperform dino oil, even in non-extreme conditions. any new engine that i get from now on will run full synthetic. i also believe that an oil additive package (added by the oil manufacturer) that includes teflon is good for a high mileage engine. at the least, it can't hurt, and maybe i'm just wasting my money--but it is my money to waste.
i agree there are a lot of snake oils out there. but techron fuel system cleaner, seafoam for certain specialized things, and synthetic oils are something i now believe in.
