Gotcha350

That's an issue all DIG engines will face...I do a top engine cleaning along with an induction cleaning every 3 years/30k...might be helping...might not...but I know that's the only way to clean the valves short of taking the intake off and doing soft media blasting.

I have a friend that has an Audi RS4 and he gets his heads and intake cleaned every 3 year...I think it's an 08 cause its been done twice...all due to the engine design with Audi's DIG carbon issue...

BinaryJay

Because the fix is not for burning excessive oil, it's for misfires. Your car needed to be misfiring to fail the test and get the work done. For burning oil the fix is the same - as it is in every car - you burn oil excessively because your rings are not doing their job, but if all you're doing is burning oil you don't qualify and if you're misfiring but not burning oil you do. The way I see it is, they are two different failures... every car is eventually prone to burning excessive oil, and that can be caused by multiple different things. If your car was not misfiring, then the cause was not due to the problem that the service was designed to address. The fix for the misfires is the top engine cleaning, replacing the rings is for preventing or at least extending the time period between needing to do more top engine cleans. The rings do not prevent the misfires, they help prevent the buildup that leads to misfires. A car with rings that are causing massive amounts of oil to burn has got bad rings, and not all GS have bad rings but rather rings that were low tension and allow too much blow-by for a DI engine.

That's all. Not sure why people keep talking about burning oil when burning oil was not the common problem, the misfires are.

LexusLive

You explained this better than any of the 5 Lexus people I've talked to about this, from the dealer to corporate customer service. So do you think I should just get a top engine clean? I've been told by my dealer that my engine needs the whole piston ring/decarbon/valve spring work at $6300 and I'm outside the warranty so I have to pay. No way in hell I'm putting that much into the car, I'll just drive it till it dies, which will probably be 25K miles, so screw it. Let it die a painful death. But if the top engine clean will help alleviate the problem, I might go for it. Very discouraged now, I enjoy and take pride in maintaining my cars, people laugh at me for it. But when you have a defective, dying car in the garage, all the joy of driving/maintaining it goes out the sooty carbon tinged tailpipe, as it were.

It's odd, because I could live with a misfire, I get that my car is 9 years old and has 88K. And it's happened exactly once in the 68K plus miles and 7 years I have owned it. But the thought of owing an oil burning Lexus makes me shudder with fear... a fear realized by the whopping repair bill Nalley Lexus presented me with.

Anyway, now that I'm safely (from Lexus's viewpoint) outside the 9 year extended warranty window, the dealer is like "yeah, your engine is toast, and you have pay for it. I bet once they don't have to hassle with getting Lexus Corporate to honor the warranty, a lot more engines 'qualify' but you also have to write the check.

I bet when I finally have to unload my GS, it'll be for less than what I got for my wife's 99K '03 Corolla, on which she change the oil and washed once per year, whether it needed it or not.
So frustrating, and I've been reading your posts, you sounded really frustrated with Lexus Canada as well.

BinaryJay

Chances are the top engine clean will make your car run a lot better, but probably won't do anything about the oil consumption because it only addresses build up on the valves that prevent them from sealing properly.

Your engine is not toast, it will just burn oil, so just add oil to it. It may eventually need new catalytic converters/o2 sensors a bit earlier than normal but it will not implode. The burning of the oil will increase the rate that deposits form on the valve and the misfire issue will become worse. You can probably get years between needing to do top engine cleans or any kind of maintenance directly related to this, which should only cost a few hundred dollars and not break the bank.

Yes it was frustrating for me because before they came around to changing the rings as a more permanent fix they already attempted to "fix" it twice while it was still under warranty and then I couldn't find anybody willing to do the ring service when it was out of warranty instead blaming the already well documented issues with the misfires on various other unrelated things. The problem here is that the dealers seem to have much more of a free hand in these things to do as they like and corporate defers everything to the dealerships whereas in the US it seems like people can call corporate just about anything and get them to take action. I finally got lucky with one of the dealers who was willing to just do the misfire diagnosis and not BS their way around it and just do the job without requiring me to pay obscene amounts of money up front for totally unrelated diagnostics with no guarantee they will lead to any kind of warranty action.

So my advice is to watch your consumption if it keeps getting worse to the point of you actually being able to see blue smoke pouring out the back of your car whenever you're driving then you've got an issue but if your oil is just kind of slowly disappearing without any obvious manifestations of it then it's no big deal - it may just stay the way it is now forever and you just decrease your oil change interval to compensate and get on with life.

So I'm happy with the car, I'm happy I got that job done and I don't (hopefully) have to think about it any more. The body of the car still looks pristine given it's age, and the style has stood the test of time as well. Just about the only thing I'm not happy with is that I bought the car when I had zero kids and now I have two and the trunk is a sad sad state of affairs now... I also hate that the car has near zero utility for hauling **** around but these problems aren't big enough for me to go to the expense of switching vehicles and along with it the usual whole new host of unique problems that every car on the road comes with.

Driven the car 15,000 miles in the last 5+ years. It should last forever as long as the body doesn't disintegrate.

sam12345

iTrader: (1)

Why don't you run the system I posted? It gets rid of all the carbon in the entire system, intake, heads, valves, pistons, exhaust.

LexusLive

Wow, thank you so much BinaryJay. I like your answer, it's what I was hoping to do. I made a last ditch effort to get Corporate to change their mind about giving me a 4 month grace period extension and doing the ring job etc. as warranty work, but I expect they will just ignore me from now on. I'm sure I'm on the troublemaker list.

We are in remarkably similar circumstances, my GS body is also rather pristine, and we have a baby on the way. But we got a Mazda CX-5 for my wife to do most of the baby ferrying tasks, so the GS should be largely spared from baby messes.

LexusLive

I don't want to upset the apple cart, is there any chance your system can make things worse? The car has misfired just once, and it's never happened again.... yet.

Niktak

The reason the rings are getting blow by is because of all the s##t coming off the filthy intake valves. Two different problems, but all based off of the same design flaw.

Niktak

If everybody with a 06 gs300 had done that every 10k their car might make it as long as the bottom like a geo metro..... Problem is after 50k or so the rest of the engines already toast.

BinaryJay

This is only partially correct, the rings blow-by on most of the cars straight out of the factory no matter how clean the valves are because of the tension of the rings that were originally installed for fuel economy reasons. This is normally not a problem but the direct injection system provides no means for the eventual deposits on the valves to be cleaned off by gasoline.

The deposits do not cause the blowby, the design does. If the blowby is bad enough that you are losing excessive amounts of oil it is due to the rings or cylinder bore failing, but, yes, according to the document about the ring fix it could be caused if the buildup becomes excessive enough to crack off pieces of hard carbon into the bores causing the bore itself to become gouged so the rings can no longer seal at all.

In my case, they did not as far as I could tell from my invoice, have to replace the block so I guess mine "looked ok" when they were in there. My car began to suffer from the problem of nearly stalling when coming to a stop at around 55,000 miles. The first repair back then was they replaced the valve springs, didn't really make much of a difference but it helped probably mainly because they cleaned up the valves a bit while they were in there. The second repair was the top engine clean which made a big difference but didn't solve the problem completely. The final repair replacing the rings has pretty much made the car run like I would expect BUT fuel economy took a dive probably losing around 2 MPG in my mostly city driving.

So... if your rings have failed because they overheated, or warped for any reason then no amount of cleaning will change oil consumption. If your bore(s) have become scratched then no amount of cleaning will change oil consumption. Cleaning will make the car run better 100% of the time if the valves are very dirty, but no cleaning system short of taking the valve cover off and literally soaking the valves for hours in a toxic cocktail and mechanically scrubbing them will clean them at that point. Terraclean etc. will not diddly squat on valves that are gunked up to the point of causing misfires. It may or may not help the problem from ever occurring if you were to do it on a regular basis starting from when everything is clean, that depends on how trusting you are of these automotive snake oil type services. But take a look at the bottom of your BBQ after a whole summer of BBQing and you tell me if you think that the engine cleaning service of your choice could make that BBQ look brand new... no, the only way to clean that BBQ is to take it apart and scrub the hell out of it and even then it is not easy.

sam12345

iTrader: (1)

I understand so this happens to 100% of all gs300 made in 2006? Probably kills the resale value

Savannah93

Took my 1999 GS 400 to local Lexus dealer for a coil pack replacement and saw one of the recalled IS cars on a lift with the entire drive train on the ground and the motor completely apart. WHOA! Service rep told me Lexus had recalled all cars with this motor from 2006-2011. The dealer had already done over 200 at about $5 grand per vehicle. I was surprised at the oil consumption issue. My GS 400 has 250,000 miles and it consumes NO oil whatsoever. In fact when I check the oil level no matter how many miles it's been driven, the color looks as golden as when I put it in, so it clearly isn't getting any significant blow-by past the rings. The way the car feels, If I put it on a chassis dyno, I bet it would make as much power as the day it left the factory.

I have owned one other Lexus, a 1990 LS 400. I had it as a leased company car. In 3 years, it never had a single repair, so, at least during the time I drove it, it was my only 'perfect' car. Both these cars were first year models. Normally, I won't touch 1st year models, since, no matter the testing regimen, most brands see teething issues in year 1. I've often wondered whether Lexus over-engineered its new models to cement brand loyalty.

LexusLive

Let's face it. The build quality has dropped precipitously on the 3rd Gen GS, by Lexus standards. And it's starting to show, as our early 2006 models start to accumulate more miles. You never heard of this kind of major engine surgery happening on such a massive scale at Lexus. And my interior is now riddled with annoying broken bits - the rear sunshade, the cupholder lid, and the ML cd player are all broken.

I was planning on driving 200K Plus relatively maintenance free miles, based on over a decade of Lexus automobiles that did it with ease (like your old LS and GS). And because i am just outside the 9 year window, they have told me I will have to pay for the work myself.

LexusLive

Assuming I decide to have the engine rebuilt, is there any chance I could just get a used 350 engine put in? As long as I'm blowing $6 large, why not get the better engine?

Gotcha350

I guess you could...but you would need an ECU, possibly a TCM, maybe a few harnesses...

And as far as build quality goes....its going to get worse due to manufactures trying to meet the upcoming carb requirements...more forced induced engines creating power to still be fast....cheaper materials to save weight...Japanese quality and longevity of the 90s and early 2000s is going by the wayside...