DPF wash out and rebuild

[Greg Roles]

Well my DPF had pretty much clogged at 120kms, and as I am still as yet to find the right sports core, I decided to recondition what I have to buy a bit more time.

The Viezu Race file no doubt led to an early fill level, and this is the reason most decent tuners won't put more than a "stage 1" or mid level performance tune on DPF equipped cars. My own DPF has gone from 3/4 filled ( 30g carbon ) which took 4 years, to the full 40g carbon in just a year of full on race files, so the soot / ash produced is too much for the general public. I was well aware of this going in though : )

Anyway my car was wanting to regen every other drive, and I only had about 50kms of range between regens, and this was driving me nuts. I decided to pull out the core and pressure wash it out, and see what happened.

Removal was relatively straight forward, and there is a great guide here, so I won't bother writing up that proceedure. Jazd did help me with a few points, so thanks for such a great guide!!


With the DPF out, it was time to cut it open with the aim of not damaging the core. As you can see from the pics below, it sits on a small ledge top and bottom, so I cut a little above the lower weld, so as to not damage this shelf, and also used a worn down 1mm cutting blade so as to limit my entry depth. You can see I still nicked the core in a few spots. The first pic is my prototype DPF and you can see I cut a bit too low. You can see the core is about 2mm below the case, wrapped in some sort of heat shield stuff, probably asbestos, so take care!! I used a mask just in case.