Borescope Inspection Under the Valve Cover of a KIA Soul

This is a borescope video of a portion of the area under the valve cover of my 2016 KIA Soul. This is the 1.6 GDI engine.

This borescope inspection actually had a practical purpose. My car just passed the 50,000-mile mark and is also coming due for an oil change, and I wanted to check for sludge in the engine. If there were sludge, I would have used a good engine flush like Liqui Moly Pro Line before changing the oil. But because I don't like using engine flushes unless there's actually a sludge problem, I wanted to check first.

The reason I chose to scope under the valve cover was because that's one of the places where sludge tends to accumulate because of all the nooks and crannies. It serves as a convenient place to get some idea of the overall amount of sludge in the engine. Using a borescope to check under there is much easier and faster than removing the valve cover.

The engine turned out to be amazingly sludge-free, no doubt at least partly because I change the oil regularly and use only high-quality synthetic motor oil. My present favorite is Castrol Edge Titanium, which is specially formulated to reduce carbon deposits on the valves of GDI engines. Apparently it also does a good job keeping the engine free of sludge.

This video was shot using a DEPSTECH DS-450 Dual-Lens Industrial Endoscope and edited using Magix Movie Edit Pro Premium.