How to Clean and Refinish Valves

hey guys and welcome to another episode in today's video I'm gonna show you how to restore a valve that you have for your engine and make it look brand new again so I'm in the middle of working on my cylinder head and I'm almost done the porting and polishing procedure now I do have a video coming out for that and it's taken quite a long time because it's a lot of work and a lot of man-hours that are being put into that but I wanted to give you guys a video in the meantime and let you guys know what I'm up to so in today's video I'm gonna show you how to go from a valve that looks like this that's disgusting corroded and covered in old oil and carbon and I'm gonna show you how to make it look like this where it basically looks brand-new so the process is quite simple you don't need a lot of tools for it and the results speak for themselves now in this video I mean working on the valves from my Mini Cooper motor but you can apply this exact same thing to any kind of valves that you're working with so it doesn't matter if you're working on intake valves or exhaust valves this concept is the exact same thing so I'm gonna first show you the difference between the two and I'm going to show you how to get that done so these here are two intake valves so this guy right here is the one that's covered in carbon and it looks disgusting so this does have a lot of kilometers on it it has 120,000 to be more specific and this one here is the exact same valve as this guy but cleaned up and polished and you can see it looks great so it doesn't matter which way you look at it it looks better from every direction so this valve right here is what's happened after a direct injection engine has gotten to it and it's done its damage for 120,000 kilometers now beforehand I cleaned up this entire valve and remove the large pieces of carbon that were found on here and you can see that there's a good amount of stuff that's found around the outside perimeter of the valve and that right there is what's actually making my engine have an improper seal there are gonna be two different ways that you can make the valves usable again there's gonna be a quick way and then a more professional way I'm going to show you how to do both of those should you want to choose between the two so I have right here a tray that has all the components to my cylinder head now if you look on this line right here this is all my intake valves and this line of valves right here is all for my exhaust you can see that the first four look great and the back four don't quite look so good I'm gonna show you how to make these ones here look like this so to begin I'll be using my Dewalt drill and installing each one of these valves into the Chuck of the drill now the reason why I'm doing this is because I can make the entire valve spin on an axis and then all that I'll have to do after that is grab either the sandpaper or the scotch-brite and just hold it on the valve so you can see how easy it is to actually remove all the dirt to build up in the imperfections on each one of the valves now depending on how dirty it is and how complex it is you might have to just clean up the vows first with a little bit of degreaser but if it's just a light amount of dirt or a light amount of buildup you can remove all of it just like this so doing it this way will get you by and this is what most shops will do when you're just gonna have to get the cylinder head refinished a little bit they're not gonna go to a crazy extent to go ahead and polish the valves all that they're going to do is this process right here now this is good this did remove most of it but we can make this a little bit better now if you do care about your engine this is the prime time to get this done so at this point you can see that it does look pretty good all the carbons removed but we can still make this look a little bit better you can see by comparing it next to an older valve you can see how much crap we've removed from the valve itself so if there's any more carbon that's on there all you're gonna have to do is turn your drill on hold it a little piece of scotch right there and it will do its thing you're not gonna want to do the work itself you're gonna want to let the drill do its thing so just hold the piece of scotch brite wherever it needs to be and all the carbon will come off the valve that I have here on the left is after I've polished it and after I've made it look good the valve on the right is only after I've used the scotch brite now it does look pretty good but we still can make this look a little bit better so for the next step I'm gonna be grabbing a bowl and putting a little bit of water in it and you'll see why the reason why I'm going to be doing this is because for the next parts what we're gonna be doing is when you wet sanding the valve I'm first gonna begin with an 800 grit piece of sandpaper and we're gonna do the same kind of process as we did with a scotch brite but instead of the scotch brite it's sandpaper so this is gonna be removing the heavier imperfections and the scratch marks that we embedded while we were using this scotch brite so with the valve inside the drill just turn it on and let the sandpaper do its thing if you can keep the valve along with the sandpaper completely submerged in the water we're not going to have any dust that's going to come off of the valve and we're not gonna have any dirt or whatever that's going to be airborne when you do it like this the sandpaper also lasts a little bit longer so be sure to get the stem be sure to get the bottom and be sure to just get every single part of it so that everything gets sanded and is nice and uniform after what sending our valve with our 800 good sandpaper we can see that we've got a nice finish and it looks like this if it doesn't look like this you're gonna want to go back and keep using the 800 grit until looks really nice and really smooth so at this point we've got a much better finish than just the scotch brite but if we want we can make this look even better now to do that we're gonna be going to a higher grit sandpaper and we're gonna wet sand it again I'm gonna be using 1,000 grit and then we're gonna keep working our way up until we get to our polish so just like before we're gonna have our entire thing submerged under water we're gonna have our valve we're gonna have our thousand grit sandpaper and we're just gonna refine those scratches and make it really smooth so once that's done it's gonna have a finish that looks kind of like this so it's gonna be a little bit glossy err it's gonna look a little bit nicer and it's gonna look really close to a polished finish now again the more you refine that and the more you sand it down the better it's going to look and the better the fuel and air is going to be able to flow over top of the valve next up we're going to be moving to our 1500 grit sandpaper so again we're gonna have it submerged in our water we're gonna grab our valve do the exact same thing and remove all of our sanding marks you should be spending about five minutes to do each one of these sanding steps per valve so after everything is all said and done you're probably gonna be spending around half an hour per valve to make it perfectly smooth after our 1500 grit it's gonna look something like this now to complete the sanding stage we're going to be finishing off with our 3000 grit sandpaper so this looks nothing like a regular piece of sandpaper this actually has some size to it so it looks kind of like a piece of foam and you're gonna be using it in the exact same way as the other sandpaper so again we're gonna go over the entire thing the bottom part the top part and we're gonna make sure everything looks really good the craziest part of this finish is that we can still make it look even better we're gonna be using some mothers metal polish along with the rag and we're gonna make it look amazing we're gonna make it look to be honest better than new so for this step we don't need our bowl in the water all that we need is our mothers polish and a microfiber towel or even a shop towel for that matter you're going to apply a little bit to the rag and then once you have it on there each you're gonna work it into the metal now once the actual polish gets down and gets into the metal the polish itself is gonna turn black and that's completely normal so once you take your rag off of the valve you're gonna see black all over it and that means that the Polish is working for this polishing step I spent a good two minutes on the drill on the max setting and it looks really nice now keep in mind after you're done using the Polish you do need to buff off the excess and you can use that same microfiber towel to get that done however after you're done polishing it it should look like a complete mirror finish and I've got to say this looks pretty damn good comparing this now to our old intake valve there is no comparison between the two you can see that the one on the left the new one that we polished up looks so much better than the old one now at this point you're just gonna repeat these exact same steps to each one of your valves and everything at that point is gonna be good to go now what I think is such a good idea about doing it this way is that you're not gonna have any possibility of damaging anything you can go ahead and completely clean out all the intake valves along with your exhaust valves and if you're using this bowl method you can see how much crap actually settles to the bottom so this is all basically little tiny pieces of the shavings from the metal and it's a little bit of that coming off but it's also a lot of the dirt so by cleaning up each one of these valves and making it super polished to the point that it is this reflective and this nice you're actually going to be improving the performance of the engine because all the air isn't going to want to necessarily stick to this verses a valve that looks like this or even just a regular valve for instance the more you can polish this the better off your engine is going to be since I had a few other valves to do what I consider doing what I tried to do was actually throw each one of these valves inside my sandblasting cabinet before going ahead through the polishing stages so what I did is I threw the entire valve inside my sandblasting cabinet I've got glass media in here and I blasted off all the carbon and all the imperfections on the valve first I only sandblasted the bottom part of the valve so that when I installed it inside my drill what I could do is just install it on the end of it and then just do the exact same procedure that I outlined before the difference between doing it this way and just starting off with a scotch brite is that I can guarantee that there is no more carbon left on this valve doing it this way takes a little bit more time and gives you a very similar result and it's completely up to you whatever route you guys want to do both will work now I'll be straight with you guys the process itself isn't really that difficult the only thing about it is that it's quite time-consuming now if you do have a drill either corded or electric it's going to make life a lot easier because you're not really going to be doing much to work other than holding the sandpaper or whatever up to the valve because this is doing all the work and it's spinning all you have to do is insert it inside the Chuck tighten this up and then go to town because if you could turn this it's preventing you and saving you from doing all the physical work of getting those imperfections out now what's really nice about doing it this way too is that you have a very uniform result so because this is basically inside a chuck and it's spinning if you hold it here it's gonna be completely consistent throughout so all you do is just grind down any of the imperfections and then you're going to be done now there's one thing that you're going to need to consider so these valves that I'm working with right here this is an intake valve and this is coated you can see that the end down here the bottom part I gotta get this to focus you can see that the bottom part has like a little different color to it and that's because the end of it is coated this one however is the exact same valve but when you go ahead and do the polishing procedure you are going to be removing that coating that's on there now over time it's kind of hard to say because this was completely covered in carbon so with this kind of method here and this kind of finish were in theory going to be able to see much better results and the carbon isn't going to want it was it's not gonna want to stick to the valve like this one here now those are trade offs you can buy aftermarket valves you can purchase better valves bigger ones smaller ones depending on what your build is you guys can do whatever you want but if you're just reconditioning it you're going to be going from something like this to something like this if you guys want to pick up any of the products that I use today you guys can check out the description box and I'll have links for everything whether it be the drill whether it be any kind of the sandpapers everything is going to be down there now if you guys aren't subscribed to the channel and you want to stay up to date and you want to see what's going on click that subscribe but if not if you have any questions throw them down in the comment section below gonna be more than happy to help again guys thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one peace [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: milanmastracci

Views: 633,683

Rating: 3.9806695 out of 5

Keywords: valves, how to clean your valves, intake valves, exhuast valves, how to clean and refinish valves, how to clean intake valves, how to clean engine valves without special tools, cleaning exhaust valves, cleaning intake valves, how to safely clean your valves

Id: 6CMrbiS2BsI

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018