Sticky soot @ EGR normal?

[TheHouseDoctor]

hello all...

decided to clean my EGR today. Have 88k miles and not too long ago I started to get surges and misses while driving. Heard it might have something to do with the EGR being gunked up or bad so I went to ford, bought o-ring kit, and took it out today to clean.

EGR seemed coated, but not plugged. What worries me is that the soot that was stuck to it was a little sticky. I stuck my finger down the hole and scraped a little off with my nail from the bottom and the soot had mounded up a little underneath and that soot was sticky enough to form a ball... Is this normal?

I scraped what I could to clean things up and then modified the ol' shop vac to suck out the debris... What do you think? stupid california egr BS!

[Tuscany]

That's normal as your engines CCV dumps into the intake pre-turbo so it sucks oily vapor into the intake manifold. Now if there was a clear evidence of liquid sitting in the manifold and the EGR valve was WET then you have other problems. From what I can decipher from your post it sounds normal.