From a historical maintenance perspective I'm kind of interested in the data on your vehicle i.e. do you drive mostly city or high way miles and about what % city vs hwy, do you buy diesel mostly from high vol truck stops, do you use any diesel fuel additives?
Just wondering whether its the city drivers that are having the most problems with the EGR? My driving is mostly hwy at 60-70 mph at a rate of 120 miles a
day due to work, with only a few local miles on weekends. No problems yet with the EGR and there is 57K miles on the clock. Trying to decide whether I should pull the EGR and clean so that I maintain my goal of the car being available 100% of the time 24/7 with out any unplanned down time except for scheduled "routine" maintenance.
Would consider a short posting of the steps involved for pulling the EGR and any before and after pictures you might have of the cleaning?
The wife drives it 90% of the time. Every couple months we take a 400 mile trip to visit family down in Oregon, when I drive I average about 75-80 MPH on the interstate, on the highway it's usually 65 MPH. Besides that the rest of the time the car is driven mostly in the small town we live in. Once in a while we drive it to the next town to do our larger grocery shopping and that's probably about 30 miles or so at the most.
I did take pics of the EGR while it was all plugged up, I don't think I have the permissions to post pics because I'm not a paying member at this time. I didn't take any after I cleaned it, I was in a hurry to get it installed to see if that was truly the problem.
As far as pulling the EGR valve, all I did was remove the plastic cover on top of the motor and removed the two T-30 Torx bits that bolt it in, there was a bracket that held a small hard line that caught the ear of the EGR so I removed the two 10mm bolts and it allowed for enough clearance to pull the EGR out of its home. The EGR is located on the back side of the engine, basically if you were to look at your firewall and notice the heater core lines going into the cab, it would be directly across from that on the Engine side (hope that makes sense).
Here is a link to the pic of that EGR.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/...9/6405680710559721346?authkey=CMy8s7_x_8q_mgE Hope it works...
