I began to tear down my engine today to figure out where this annoying tick is coming from and found this after I removed the intake manifold. Should It look like this? Only 2 of the 6 cylinders are clean.

Also, does anyone know how to fix the tick that many people have with the vq35 engine?

 

Someone else recently posted a thread with this same situation only with 5 cylinders being carbon covered rather than 4.

Very strange..

That being the intake manifold tho, that must be egr carbon. Why its not going into just those 2 cylinders is kind of mystical. Haha