When I worked on turbines we used walnut shell for decarbing the engines.
Not so finely crushed, either. No chemicals were required with the walnut
shells but we also water washed the engines for minor cleaning. We used no
chemicals in the water because the high heat would have just caused anything
to plate on the high temp parts of the engines.

While operating a gas turbine plant in Latin America (GE LM1500s) using
diesel fuel supplied from Venezuela we had a severe vanadium plating problem
which just about halved the useful life of high temp items. That cheap
Venezuelan oil was pretty expensive.

Butch
"Shortwave Sportfishing" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:22:19 -0400, JohnH wrote:

On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 05:44:42 -0400, "Eisboch" wrote:


"Jeff Burke" wrote in message
...
On 11 Aug 2006 15:17:01 -0700, "basskisser" wrote:
Again, there's been many many documented tests where they've used
various products much like, if not Seafoam, to clean carbon deposits.
Now I'm not saying that if the top of a piston has very minor carbon,
that seafoam won't make it look clean, but if you've got carbon enough
so that your compression has gone up, and results in pinging without
higher octane fuel, then it ain't going to do much for you.

Check with the Vulcan riders at vroc.org. The Vulcan 800 is known to
build
up
carbon from using high octane fuel or from lugging it too much. Seafoam
does the
trick on the 800, it sure worked on mine. I don't think the carbon
problem
is
causing any boost in compression, I think the "spark knock" that some
have
cured
with Seafoam was caused by carbon making hot spots that caused
pre-ignition.
Some bike got so bad that the engine actually had a knock in the engine
that
sounded like piston slap or bad bearings, turned out to be real bad
carbon
build
up that actually hit the pistons. Those bikes had to have their engines
torn
down. This could have been avoided if they used Seafoam, but not cured
once it
went that far.

Seems like I recall old shade tree mechanics using a device that hooked
up
to a garden hose and created a very fine water mist at the carb inlet on
cars that had carbon buildup on the tops of the pistons. The very small
amount of water that mixed with the air/fuel mixture was supposed to burn
off the accumulated carbon.

I don't think I'd try this on a modern, fuel injected, $14.000.00 engine
however.

I've seen people, back in the old days, pour a half pound of rice down
their carbs while the engine was going about 3500 rpm. A *lot* of black
stuff came out the exhaust! I don't know if it was carbon or just burnt
rice.

Again, I wouldn't try this at home.

When they built the new gas turbine power plant down in Killingly, I
wondered what the bright green smoke was coming out of one of the
stacks one day. I knew one of the engineers there, so one time I
asked him what the green smoke was.

Get this - finely crushed walnut shells. I guess they chuck them into
the turbines at low rpm to clean the burner cans from time-to-time.
The green is a chemical that does the cleaning and the fine crushed
walnut shells are the transport medium.

Don't; know if that's true or not, but that's what he said.