Anyone have a view on what the life expectancy of the injectors is? (on a 308/328 type engine) Do they wear & if so what happens when they do? Does the car just start running badly or does it just over-fuel the engine a bit first leading to excessive fuel consumption? Is there any way to test them? rgds Iain
They don't really wear out. I have seen other vehicles with K-jectronic injection go well into the +200k Mi. range on the original injectors. What does happen is they can get dirt/debris or varnish build-up on the seat and pintle area. This causes the injector to have a poor spray pattern. A new injector will have a cone shaped spray pattern that atomizes the fuel very well at all levels of fuel output. A bad or dirty injector will spray a stream of fuel at low levels of output. This will show up more at idle than at higher RPM. You can have the injectors checked for opening pressure and spray pattern at a shop that has the right equipment.
I changed out mine when the car hit 22 years. Didn't really have any problems, but afterwards I did notice that it ran/accellerated more smoothly. I bought them from www.injectorsonline.com -- best price for true Bosch, even figuring in the international shipping.
The original Bosch CIS injectors were steel and they did tend to develop problems around 100-150K miles. The new ones are of brass construction and are of a different opening pressure so they must be replaced all at once. I have 8 new ones for my 308 which will be going in shortly. At least with Mercedes V8s, it wasn't uncommon to have one nozzle with a bad spray pattern causing a rough idle, but, as Motob said, the problem will show up moreso at idle than under load. Cheers, Aaron '82 GTSi '83 400iA
They start dripping when they get old. I changed mine when the car was 13 years old with 57,000 miles on it.
