Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Troubleshooting TB cleaning

My accelerator pedal stucks sometimes, mainly when I brake and re-accelerate, so I am thinking in cleaning the TB as it could be dirty. My question is if I can use Carb cleaner (instead of TB cleaner)? is there any difference?,
Also the Haynes manual says I should not clean some parts of the TB (with TB cleaner), wich parts exactly are they?, any picture??

The Throttle bodies have a teflon coating on the inside bore that starts behind the throttle plate. The reason for not using cleaner or wiping in that area is becasue of the chance of abrading away the coating.

The first thing you can try is to clean the outside of the throttle body like the areas where the throttle cable attaches. Clean the throttle linkage and return spring they tend to get dirty over time.

AFAIK, carb cleaner and tb cleaner are one and the same. Personally I use Ford's foaming TB/combustion chamber cleaner. It does a decent job of cleaning the intake tract past your TB.

Although the teflon coating does slow down the gunky build up on the throttle body, it does not prevent it. The teflon coating does need to be treated with care, but the throttle body still gets dirty and still needs cleaning from time to time. I clean mine fairly often (at least every 10,000 miles) and I can definitely notice an improvement every time.

This topic has been covered many times and you should be able to find detailed instructions with a search.

my accelerator would do the same thing...usually after the 99 mile drive from home to my mommy's house...when i'd get off the freeway and stop at the light it would stick just a bit when giving it gas...cleaning the throttle body (and the cable) definitely made a difference...and i was told at the parts store to use throttle body cleaner and NOT carb cleaner as it could cause damage ...actually what i used was b12 chemtool intake cleaner

the back of my throttle body was dirtiest part overall although the egr ports behind it were a mess too...

as jim said there should be tons of info on site now including pics to help u get started...and if u can buy another metallized gasket to replace the old one...

i reused my old one because the dealer wanted to make me purchase 4

and u can feel the difference in performance after doing the clean...my car regained a good amount of low end torque after the cleaning

just take it off..carb cleaner does a fine job, it's like $5 from ford too...works great. Don't worry about the teflon coating, it's useless, if it did what it was intended to do, you're throttle would not be sticking. No big deal really...and I would take it off the car and clean it by hand because it's rather hard to do with it on, and I wouldn't want all that crap blowing through my engine.