So I bought my first cl9 off craigslist, long story short amazing car, well kept, but I was lied too. I was told mobil 1 synthetic changes every 3k and it has 245k miles (beautiful condition) but this is doubtful as I just went to do my first mobil 1 change (wix filter) and i decide too stick a flashlight in and have a look. Upon inspection there is black sludge everywhere, the mobil 1 i put in turned medium brown in the 1st 100 miles but the startup slight tap went down a bit. What the hell can I do if this car had cheap dino oil ran through it, its whole life. Id like to get it as clean as possible seeing as aside from the sludge, cold start noise and control arm bushing this car lived in a salt free garage with 1 owner. Would it be wise to open it up and clean off the valvetrain and other innards? The car shifts great, ac works, and pulls hard... aside from the tensioner what can I do/replace while I clean it out IF i clean it. I still need too figure out how.

 

Hello, and welcome to Honda-Tech.

No. You're fine. Even Mobil 1 synthetic can get sludgy. (Although you should have checked the oil dipstick before buying, but that's neither here, nor there). So, you probably weren't "LIED TO". You don't get to 245,000 miles without good care maintained with this particular car.

So, relax. You're going to have some "brown" in the valvetrain. That's common. All you can do is drain the pain, and start putting in and maintaining it with the oil of your choice. There's no point in trying to clean out all of the valvetrain just for part of your oil change. The MAIN important part of understanding the K24A2 oil schedule is to make sure that enough oil is within the crankcase at ALL times to keep the timing chains from stretching. (That is the #1 cause of the K24A2 powerplant failing from a TSX, is the timing chains going due to not checking the oil levels, in-between oil changes, when engines like this start to burn a bit of oil off sooner than 3K miles...

That's what you need to focus your energies on. Not a small amount of sludge on the valvetrain components. The valves will get quieter

 

theres a slow (between oil changes) cleaner that I used on multiple cars with great success.
its called autoRX and only sold from one store and from reading bobtheoilguy I belive its a proprietary formula that the guy doesn't want to sell to anyone
I used it in my integra and it went from black to gold in 2 oil changes
on the t100 it went from dark brown to gold in one oil change since it wasn't that bad
BUT. if you have oil leaks it is pointless to use if you have to add a lot of oil between oil changes. which is what happened in the RL about 2000 miles later after adding the cleaner I pretty much added all new oil to it and had no auto RX left circulating the engine.. so that was a waste lol

 

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