DIY head/block/component cleaning?
Discussion
what tips or tricks have you guys got for cleaning components before rebuilding? im thinking of diff, gearbox bits as well as heads and blocks?
cellulose thinners?
white spirit?
petrol diesel?!
pressure washer?
Gunk or Jizer etc?
all of the above?
give me your recommendations to ease the pain (and stink!) of cleaning oily turney bits...
cheers
CNH
cellulose thinners?
white spirit?
petrol diesel?!
pressure washer?
Gunk or Jizer etc?
all of the above?
give me your recommendations to ease the pain (and stink!) of cleaning oily turney bits...
cheers
CNH
depending on what the block is and componets etc
aluminuim will rust within minutes of been wet , dry realy well aslo spray some sort of oil to prevent this wd40 or something along those lines .
if money allow's local machine shop would be my choice if not petrol .
just if you take stuff to machine shop make sure they remove all the plug's etc as some machine shop's miss 1 and end up with a oil galleiry still full of crap
aluminuim will rust within minutes of been wet , dry realy well aslo spray some sort of oil to prevent this wd40 or something along those lines .
if money allow's local machine shop would be my choice if not petrol .
just if you take stuff to machine shop make sure they remove all the plug's etc as some machine shop's miss 1 and end up with a oil galleiry still full of crap
Always de-bung the block(remove the oil gallery plugs)and core plugs if your doing this kind of thing,personally if the blocks not painted or coated i always used gunwash/cellulose thinners(dont inhale vapours)but do prefer the hot tank method it remove a lot of the crap in the water jacket(especially cast iron)which no amount of DIY cleaning will do.
Edited by That Daddy on Friday 7th November 09:47
CNHSS1 said:
Boosted
what sort of cost and any drawbacks?
Garages don't usually charge much for this service. Remove the oil gallery plugs and wire brush off the worst of the crap. Then, if you can find a place that does chemical dipping go there as your parts will be like new when they come back. Fewer people do the dipping so your next bet is a hot tank wash and clean. Sometimes that works well, sometimes it's dissapointing. Again it depends on the chemicals being used and if they are fresh or used. I wouldn't bother with steam/jet cleaning out of the tank. Can't think of any draw backs except to say make sure you get all the parts back so right a list first.what sort of cost and any drawbacks?
Here are my recommendations as a professional engine builder for 20 years.
Big enough firms have hot wash systems like giant dish washers but all these really do is remove some of the time consuming labour element from part of the process and they certainly don't remove baked on carbon or really get the crap out of oilways. Ultrasonic systems and 'acid' tanks do but they are really way out of the DIY cost bracket.
The most important thing is a cheap parts washer tank which you can get from Machine Mart for £50 or so. I use paraffin in mine available from your local oil fuel distributer very cheaply. The 'proper' stuff has perfume in it to make it smell nice, costs several times as much and doesn't do anything any better.
To get inside oilways you want nylon test tube and burette brushes which costs pennies each from laboratory equipment suppliers. 8" long x 10mm test tube brushes for the smaller holes and 18" long x 12mm burette brushes for the long oilways in blocks.
I also have what I call my 'acid' tank which is a 75 litre cold dip tank full of methylene chloride based carbon stripper costing about £80 per 25 litres. It's big enough to get heads and 4 cylinder blocks in and removes carbon as well as paint. I stopped bothering with blocks because removing all the paint is actually counter productive and shags the fluid very quickly. A good clean in the paraffin tank is as much as blocks really need. All heads go in it though. For DIY I doubt if a £300 start up cost is worthwhile so take your heads to be dipped by an engine reconditioner and then do the manual cleaning yourself.
I disagree about removing waterway core plugs. If they're not rusty and needing changing then removing them serves no purpose. Oil way plugs need to come out and then you can get in with the brushes.
The main thing you'll find is just how long it takes to clean anything properly. You can spend an hour on a block and still find bits of crap as you run your fingertips round the nooks and crannies. I go over everthing again and again until I'm happy it's clinically clean because the best way to build a good engine is not to bugger it before it's even started with bits of grit inside it. It takes forever. It's a very significant part of the total time and cost of building an engine but it's one reason why I've never had an engine failure or comeback in 20 years. I've looked at the standards of many other so called professionals and generally conclude that what they call clean I still call filthy.
Next to the paraffin tank is a collection of tooth brushes, paint brushes and dish washing brushes of various sizes. Tooth brushes are the handiest thing for most work.
A pressure washer is handy for removing the worst of the mud and grit from the outside of blocks before you put them in the tank or you'll just make the fluid filthy before you've started cleaning anything. Don't leave anything ferrous with water on it though or it'll rust in no time.
Finally you need a compressor to blow everything out once it's dry. No matter how clean you try to keep your paraffin things will always have small particles left on them after they've dried and this removes the last of those.
Dave Baker
Big enough firms have hot wash systems like giant dish washers but all these really do is remove some of the time consuming labour element from part of the process and they certainly don't remove baked on carbon or really get the crap out of oilways. Ultrasonic systems and 'acid' tanks do but they are really way out of the DIY cost bracket.
The most important thing is a cheap parts washer tank which you can get from Machine Mart for £50 or so. I use paraffin in mine available from your local oil fuel distributer very cheaply. The 'proper' stuff has perfume in it to make it smell nice, costs several times as much and doesn't do anything any better.
To get inside oilways you want nylon test tube and burette brushes which costs pennies each from laboratory equipment suppliers. 8" long x 10mm test tube brushes for the smaller holes and 18" long x 12mm burette brushes for the long oilways in blocks.
I also have what I call my 'acid' tank which is a 75 litre cold dip tank full of methylene chloride based carbon stripper costing about £80 per 25 litres. It's big enough to get heads and 4 cylinder blocks in and removes carbon as well as paint. I stopped bothering with blocks because removing all the paint is actually counter productive and shags the fluid very quickly. A good clean in the paraffin tank is as much as blocks really need. All heads go in it though. For DIY I doubt if a £300 start up cost is worthwhile so take your heads to be dipped by an engine reconditioner and then do the manual cleaning yourself.
I disagree about removing waterway core plugs. If they're not rusty and needing changing then removing them serves no purpose. Oil way plugs need to come out and then you can get in with the brushes.
The main thing you'll find is just how long it takes to clean anything properly. You can spend an hour on a block and still find bits of crap as you run your fingertips round the nooks and crannies. I go over everthing again and again until I'm happy it's clinically clean because the best way to build a good engine is not to bugger it before it's even started with bits of grit inside it. It takes forever. It's a very significant part of the total time and cost of building an engine but it's one reason why I've never had an engine failure or comeback in 20 years. I've looked at the standards of many other so called professionals and generally conclude that what they call clean I still call filthy.
Next to the paraffin tank is a collection of tooth brushes, paint brushes and dish washing brushes of various sizes. Tooth brushes are the handiest thing for most work.
A pressure washer is handy for removing the worst of the mud and grit from the outside of blocks before you put them in the tank or you'll just make the fluid filthy before you've started cleaning anything. Don't leave anything ferrous with water on it though or it'll rust in no time.
Finally you need a compressor to blow everything out once it's dry. No matter how clean you try to keep your paraffin things will always have small particles left on them after they've dried and this removes the last of those.
Dave Baker
Edited by Pumaracing on Friday 7th November 15:05
Edited by Pumaracing on Friday 7th November 17:05
Totally agree with above,this is the kind of thing your after http://www.pazyryk.co.uk/Hookah_Pipe_Cleaning_Brus... i always got mine from good hardware store in various shapes & sizes 
or these http://www.shivaheadshop.co.uk/shop/bong_accessori... then you can use em after to clean your Bong 
or these http://www.shivaheadshop.co.uk/shop/bong_accessori... then you can use em after to clean your Bong Edited by That Daddy on Friday 7th November 16:16
Yikes - expensive brushes That Daddy. Try here.
http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Sc...
http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Sc...
30p a pop for the small test tube brush and 90p for the long burette one. I prefer a burette brush with a much shorter brush length than the one shown, a couple of inches of brush on an 18" wire stem is fine, but can't find any online which are quite the same as the ones I use and it's too long ago to even remember where I got them from. I think I just looked up a lab supplier in Slough in the Yellow Pages and drove in one day to see what they had to offer.
Dave
http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Sc...
http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Sc...
30p a pop for the small test tube brush and 90p for the long burette one. I prefer a burette brush with a much shorter brush length than the one shown, a couple of inches of brush on an 18" wire stem is fine, but can't find any online which are quite the same as the ones I use and it's too long ago to even remember where I got them from. I think I just looked up a lab supplier in Slough in the Yellow Pages and drove in one day to see what they had to offer.
Dave
Edited by Pumaracing on Friday 7th November 19:02
For anyone wanting to get serious enough about parts cleaning to invest in their own cold soak decarbonising tank I can recommend Walsall Chemical Co for supply of the fluid.
http://www.walsall-chemical.co.uk/home.cfm
I've tried various makes of brew over the years and some doesn't work at all. The best stuff is mainly methylene chloride with additions of cresylic acid and other cresols, phenols and surfactants. I've tried neat methylene chloride which is only about £30 per 25 litres and readily available but on its own it doesn't work. It removes, or at least wrinkles up and loosens paint but it turns carbon deposits into a sort of sticky gum which even the paraffin tank can't then shift. The cresols do the final job of dissolving these into solution. I've spent literally dozens of hours going into the constituents of these proprietary chemicals to try and find a cheaper way of brewing my own but found it hard to get the components other then the methylene chloride, mainly because they're thoroughly nasty things which most suppliers won't sell.
What you can do is top up your dip tank with cheaper neat methylene chloride though because this is the part that evaporates over time and the cresols just stay there. Even when the stuff has turned to the consistency of mud because it's full of dissolved crap and lots of the meth has evaporated it'll still do a decent job on carboned up heads if you top it up with meth again. Eventually when it's absorbed as much carbon into solution as it can handle the cresols stop working and it's time to change the whole lot though. That won't occur until you've treated maybe 100 or more heads in a 75 litre tank so possibly many years for DIY or a small business like mine.
The more carbon you can pressure wash or scrape off first obviously the longer the tank will last.
Dave Baker
http://www.walsall-chemical.co.uk/home.cfm
I've tried various makes of brew over the years and some doesn't work at all. The best stuff is mainly methylene chloride with additions of cresylic acid and other cresols, phenols and surfactants. I've tried neat methylene chloride which is only about £30 per 25 litres and readily available but on its own it doesn't work. It removes, or at least wrinkles up and loosens paint but it turns carbon deposits into a sort of sticky gum which even the paraffin tank can't then shift. The cresols do the final job of dissolving these into solution. I've spent literally dozens of hours going into the constituents of these proprietary chemicals to try and find a cheaper way of brewing my own but found it hard to get the components other then the methylene chloride, mainly because they're thoroughly nasty things which most suppliers won't sell.
What you can do is top up your dip tank with cheaper neat methylene chloride though because this is the part that evaporates over time and the cresols just stay there. Even when the stuff has turned to the consistency of mud because it's full of dissolved crap and lots of the meth has evaporated it'll still do a decent job on carboned up heads if you top it up with meth again. Eventually when it's absorbed as much carbon into solution as it can handle the cresols stop working and it's time to change the whole lot though. That won't occur until you've treated maybe 100 or more heads in a 75 litre tank so possibly many years for DIY or a small business like mine.
The more carbon you can pressure wash or scrape off first obviously the longer the tank will last.
Dave Baker
Pumaracing said:
Yikes - expensive brushes That Daddy. Try here.
http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Sc...
http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Sc...
30p a pop for the small test tube brush and 90p for the long burette one. I prefer a burette brush with a much shorter brush length than the one shown, a couple of inches of brush on an 18" wire stem is fine, but can't find any online which are quite the same as the ones I use and it's too long ago to even remember where I got them from. I think I just looked up a lab supplier in Slough in the Yellow Pages and drove in one day to see what they had to offer.
Dave
Yep http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Sc...
http://www.rapidonline.com/Educational-Products/Sc...
30p a pop for the small test tube brush and 90p for the long burette one. I prefer a burette brush with a much shorter brush length than the one shown, a couple of inches of brush on an 18" wire stem is fine, but can't find any online which are quite the same as the ones I use and it's too long ago to even remember where I got them from. I think I just looked up a lab supplier in Slough in the Yellow Pages and drove in one day to see what they had to offer.
Dave
Edited by Pumaracing on Friday 7th November 19:02
dont do any engine building nowadays,still got my brushes from years back,i also like to use a scotchbrite pad and some soapy water to clean the honed bores after machining just to make sure i get all the swalf of the machining/honing process out of the scratches,that last bit most important but not for you PumaRacing cos you already no about that kinda stuff i do miss engine building & that attention to detail stuff(i could still build a mean Ford X flow though 
) just could not dedicate that kind of time anymore,family,running business etc 
especially when they make big numbers 
i could never be accused of undercamming a motor 
Edited by That Daddy on Friday 7th November 20:44
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