How To Clean An Engine

you hi I'm Greg your car angel in this video we'll continue our series on how to detail an engine like a professional and for this particular video I'm choosing this Toyota Tundra which has 137 thousand miles on it and this engine has never been cleaned not in its history and it's saw a lot of agricultural use so you can just see how very dirty this engine bay is now what we're going to be doing is we're going to be detailing this portion as well as the engine and in the entire engine bay and I will be also seeing to this radiator it has a lot of bugs and stuff that kind of you can see how that's collected over time so now my experience has been that most engines can tolerate water there's just a few specific areas that you need to really be careful of and I'll go through those rather quickly right now so the first area is the mass airflow sensor now this is probably the most critical of all the areas in the engine that you're going to have to make sure it doesn't get any moisture in it and it's always on the intake there right after the air filter so I use foil it serves a really good purpose of being able to wrap around whatever electrical connection that you're trying to protect and it's very simple and it doesn't blow off when you power wash so this is a really nice way to do this much much better than plastic bags or whatever anybody else is using out there and if you get heavy duty foil it's even better I'm just going to take regular foil and now there's other areas here that you'll see that you might want to consider protecting now anything that has electrical wires going through it now see this is dirty and you're going to be putting foil on it but before you put foil on it just take an old toothbrush and and do that and then you can just put your foil right on there looking at any kind of things that look vulnerable now the spark plugs and coils are usually okay there's a few cars that you might have to worry about Mercedes Benz has deep wells that the spark plugs are are in and those deep wells would be filled up with water so like in a Mercedes Benz 5.0 you you don't want to do this but most Japanese engines are very tolerable of water so now these are the only areas that I can see on this engine that need attention and I'll start the process by putting on all-purpose cleaner everywhere on this engine that I want to have clean before I do that we'll go down to this radiator real quick and you'll see that I just got a little brush and you know I can get all these bugs off of there you want to use a nice soft bristle brush because if you have a like a wire brush then [Music] you're gonna damage the fins you don't want to damage the fins okay so now we're gonna go ahead and degrease the engine yeah late a couple of under pads under the engine block to capture a lot of the oil that's going to be coming off of the cleaning process and this will absorb quite a bit of that and it's much better than it's going into the ground or even worse going into the ocean so this is just the right thing to do and for the degreaser I don't really care which degreaser it doesn't really matter as long as it's heavy-duty and before I do that I'm actually going to put on my um my man so starting from the top I'm going to put my decreased or on and if you have a hood insulation blanket that's right here you want to avoid that because when you're going to be taking a power sprayer to this and the hood insulation blanket is not going to respond really well to high pressure but in this case we don't have a hood insulation blanket so we're we're good to put it this it right on there okay so now we're just dousing the entire engine bay with degreaser and the whole idea is just to get the degreaser everywhere where there's dirt especially around any of the fluid reservoirs that you'll find a build-up around the power steering reservoir you'll find a buildup around the brake fluid reservoir that's usually very dirty right there I've done hundreds and hundreds of engine details so you really don't have to be afraid of the moisture getting on to the engine there's some corrosion in the battery we're gonna fix that up some people get freaked out about alternators I've never found a reason to protect an alternator from moisture so you know you don't want to do this on a hot engine warm is okay in fact I prefer warm into this because I feel like it it helps keep the moisture from migrating into the into the areas that we don't want because of the heat and I know this is an engine detail video but this is a small area that because you have your power washer out you have everything you this gas tap area is always filthy so what I do is I just hit this with the all-purpose and then go back to the engine detail and I'm going to power spray this out at the end of the process to clean that area up as well okay so now I'm going to power wash the entire area so you can do this with a high-pressure hose if you want but power sprayer is really really fast and effective so starting from the top I'm going to work my way down and just get this baby cleaned up [Music] hey that's done so now I'm going to just remove all of my foil and I'm going to start the engine and I'm going to allow this to dry out so starting the engine is going to create some heat in here and we're going to dry it out before we put our final polish on the engine compartment for that nice Sheen and we'll be doing that with trim shot so one last detail that I wanted to do was that that gas tank right the gas filler area so you just hit that come look further this with a riff and you'll see that that's still pretty dirty and we're just gonna with that and boy that makes a huge difference all right so we're going to start the engine and create some heat I'm going to close the hood just so that that heat can build up and dry off that the whole engine area and give that about I don't know five ten minutes heat build-up and then we'll just wipe down any small areas of heating then we're gonna apply the trend shine okay so now I'm just gonna pull these pads out here and you can see how much oil and gunk is in there so now I'm just going to wipe down any excess water that got pooled in the engine compartment here before I apply my trim shine and trim shine of course is going to make this engine look right at this point it still doesn't look really really good if you still have a lot of whitish kind of film and it's not looking the way that we want it yet but that's where trim shine comes in and trim shine is the Detailers choice for doing exactly what i'm about to do and you'll see what difference it makes so I'm just going to start by hitting everything basically and you'll see that it just magically transformed this all the white I'll do happy engine just so you can really see this really makes the difference that it does the only area that I would stay away from with this trip shine would be the manifold the heat shield on the manifold they'll tell you you can see how this half of the engine already looking so much better than the other half so I'll just continue doing the entire engine now and you'll see the results so there you have it a really nice look of course after dressing your engine with trim shine and if you're professional detailer you want to also get this gallon model of the trim shine these are two different products though I mean they do the same thing but this is water-based and this is solvent based and the solvent based is going to be used on areas on your car of the trim for instance and the engine compartment that are going to see a lot more exposure whereas the liquid trim shine which is water-based you want to use on your interior and I also used it on the hood here underside of the hood what I'm going to do now is just sort of wipe down the areas that sort of have a little bit of a greasy look to it from that trim shine you don't want that greasy look so I just take a rag and I go around and make sure that it it doesn't have that because that's kind of a dust collector and I just go all around the engine I also pick up any spots that I might have missed with my trim shine and just get all the hoses in my opinion it looks a lot better if it's a little bit not so shiny [Music] alright so that's looking really good much much better than when we start it and when you go to sell your car by the way this is something that you definitely want to be doing someone who buys a car is going to look at the engine compartment and if it looks clean the feeling is you took care of your your car and if it's dirty like when we start it they're going to open the engine compartment see it and regardless of how well you take took care of your engine the feeling is going to be that you didn't if the engines dirty so it really pays off to do this before a sale so I hope you enjoyed my how to detail an engine video I appreciate it and I'll see you in my next video take care i'm greg your car angel

Channel: YourCarAngel

Views: 4,030,141

Rating: 4.5965734 out of 5

Keywords: engine, diy, detail, engine bay, power sprayer, detailing, automotive, how to, trim shine, clean, professional

Id: MFd_p9V8l7o

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2013