Seafoam: The $7 car upgrade

I’m kicking myself for not getting pictures and a video of this, but eh.

Last night I did the Seafoam engine treatment to the BMW. I had seen a lot of guys on the E46 forums talking about it and how it restored their car to nearly brand-new.

The Seafoam cost about $7 at AutoZone, and the worst thing you had to worry about was hydro-locking your engine if you poured it in too fast.

The instructions are pretty simple. What I did was turn the engine on for about 15 minutes to warm it up ( at least out of the blue section on the dash ). Then I went under the hood and disconnected the brake booster line.

If you plan on doing this to your car, make sure you use the brake booster line or something that you KNOW for a fact feeds into all the cylinders.

I had my neighbor keep the RPMs at 1,000-1,500 while I let the booster hose slowly suck up around half of the Seafoam.

This is very important: Don’t let your engine suck in the Seafoam too fast. You’ll hydro-lock the engine, and that is not pretty.

We switched the car off, reattached the booster line, and let the car sit for 15 minutes on the dot. I then hopped inside, moved it back where the exhaust was facing away from the apartments, and let ‘er rip.

What happened immediately was a loud “FOOOOOOOM” out of the exhaust, followed by thick white smoke. I held the engine at 5,500 - 6,200 RPMs for five minutes, until the smoke wasn’t so thick.

We then let the car idle for ten more minutes, until the smoke stopped coming out of the exhaust.

Basically, the entire apartment complex looked like it was under a layer of fog. The smoke poured out steadily the entire time, and smelt god-awful.

Because of the computer and stuff in it, the car naturally freaked out and threw every engine code in the book, along with throwing the transmission into “Limp” mode. A couple of restarts cleared the codes and transmission.

This morning I went out, started my morning commute, and couldn’t even recognize the car. It jumps off the line like a beast, doesn’t have even the slightest hint of rough idle, and has that good ole Bavarian growl back.

Best $7 evar. While I didn’t get a video, here is a video of someone else doing the treatment to their 330ci: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzQGCCXC6a0

To be honest, I had about twice as much smoke, but then again I had 70,800 miles on my engine.