How To: Polish Your Dirty Old Motorcycle Engine

[Music] you [Music] [Music] what's up guys welcome back to another episode of the 1981 GSA 50 scrambler build in this episode I'm going to show you guys how to clean your old dirty engines a lot of times on these bikes people make the paint job real nice make everything real nice and then they just leave the engine looking crummy like this for me though I'm not gonna do that and I'm gonna show you guys how to make your engine look brand new like it just came off the just came from the dealership because this this bike is almost 40 years old so it's the engine over time gets a lot of oxidation it is aluminum so it does oxidize and you kind of just lose that shine that it had when it was brand new but I'm gonna show you guys how to get your engine to look brand new again so I'm going to show you guys what you're gonna need for this job it does take a lot of elbow grease it takes a lot of determination to really get this thing to shine you can do it and not that long and make it look all right but I'm gonna be putting all the time into it that it needs I'm gonna make this thing shine like a diamond so without further ado let's show you guys what you need to do this job [Music] okay guys and we're gonna start off with the engine degreaser you definitely want to get the whole engine cleaned off of all oil and grime and whatever else will be on your engine because you want it clean before you start polishing or else you'll actually make it worse when you try to grab dirt around all over the engine so obviously we're gonna go ahead and use this engine degreaser and spray it all over the engine let it sit on there and foam up a little bit and then clean it off with a just a little bit of water and a towel so let's go ahead and get this stuff sprayed on as you can see as soon as it hits the surface it starts foaming up that's how you know it's working people it's gonna look like you kind of just sprayed whipped cream all over your engine like it's a hot fudge sundae that's how you exactly how you want it to look tada okay guys so as you can see the just the degreaser made the engine look ten times better in spots where there used to be just black nasty oil buildup that's not just clean metal and all I had to do is spray on that foamy stuff let it sit for 5-10 minutes and then spray it off with a hose so that took very minimal labor and it made it look that nice so you guys can just imagine how nice it's going to look with a lot of Labor and that brings up the next step which is I am going to take those sanding pads they're 120 grit and I put them in my drill and I'm just gonna go ahead and brush the whole surface of the of the engine some spots you won't be able to get to with this obviously but for those I'm gonna use something different so let's go ahead and clean off this engine guys I know it looks like I'm actually roughing the surface out more than it was before I'm doing this but actually guys that's I'm taking off all the oxidation and then after that I'm gonna polish it but you can't polish it until you get the surface actually cleaned up of all the oxidation yep I can already tell I'm gonna have to take this brake pedal off to get to the whole thing okay guys this is already looking so much better like you can see my reflection in it now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] I didn't list this in the beginning of the video but steel wool definitely helps with this job as you can see I couldn't really get in between the letters but the steel wool you can get in between the letters and [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] so I found that steel wool actually works really great for cleaning any fins on these engines okay guys so we've got all the oxidation off of the crankcase here and as these drill attachments do take all the oxidation off they do leave some deep scratches and those can really only be removed by sandpaper and I found that the best sandpaper to use is to start out with 500 grit and then move up to a thousand grit so I'm going to go ahead and sand this and then it will make it look less polished but it if you polish it how it is now you're gonna have a nice finish but there are still gonna be some deep scratches that you can't get out with polishing so I'm going to go ahead and sand this and then show you guys how it's looking as you can see it does make it look more a doll but trust me it'll make it look better in the end so now I'm gonna go ahead and move up to the 1000 credit okay guys and now it's time for the polishing the polishing kit from hardware freight comes with a kind of rounded flat buffing wheel like this and it also comes with three different compounds to use first you want to use the black one which gets the big scratches out and then you want to do the brown one which gets the medium scratches out and then lastly you want to use the white one which is the fine polishing compound it really brings out the shine so I'm gonna start out with this black one there [Music] you alcohol in a towel gets [Applause] and some elbow grease they just found out that paint thinner actually works a lot better at getting that compound off okay and now I'm gonna move up to the last compound which is the white one and I'm gonna use a different buffing wheel because this one seems to be pretty clogged up her fake smear and that was done in under a half an hour and it looks not nice this stuff isn't really necessary but this piece here was black before it was kind of scratched up so that's why I sanded it off but I think I'm gonna paint this black again and then I'm gonna get some sandpaper on a flat piece of wood or something and I'm gonna scratch just the letters off so they shine in the rest is flat black I'm gonna use some high heat engine enamel and also I think that these valve covers would look good flat black too and I cut out a hole in this piece of paper so I'm gonna glue this on so that I just get paint on the part that I want painted [Music] sweet [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] okay guys and after a few failures I actually found out the steel wool is the best thing to use to take the paint off of the letters when I found out that a sanding sponge block like this works really good at taking the paint off of the so off the semicircle here I've had so many people tell me to do this a guy even dm3 on Instagram telling me that I should paint the balls so make you guys happy there you go I came you the bolts I think it looks a lot better too actually but snowball fight well guys you made it to the end of the video um I think the engine looks a thousand times better and that really didn't take me too long you could put a lot of time into it getting into another little crack and everything but you know I just did just a basic overall polishing and cleaning up job and I made the engine look just so much better um so hopefully you enjoyed the video just showing you guys that you can do this too for like under $30 and it'll come out looking so much better also I painted the the bolts holding the battery cover black because some so many you guys told me that you wanted them black and - truth be told I wanted them black - I was just too lazy to paint in black but now I did and I'm happy that I did because they look a lot better so thank you guys for giving me suggestions in the comments I'm always open to reading them and if it's a good suggestion if I think it's something I would want to do to my bike then I will do it so if you guys have any suggestions leave them down in the comments below if you enjoyed the video give me a like and if you want to see more videos like this just subscribe and you'll get notified when I post a new one also I know a lot of you guys want to see moto vlogs more moto vlogs as you can see it's a bit snowy out today so it's kind of hard to do motovlogs it is the winter and it it does get cold but all that aside I'm gonna be doing a motovlog in the snow and it'll be out pretty soon so hopefully you guys will like that one I don't think I have anything else to say I think this is the end of hopefully you guys enjoyed stay tuned for the next one and see you next time guys peace out [Music]

Channel: GoldGuy

Views: 1,152,358

Rating: 4.1583686 out of 5

Keywords: gs850, suzuki, cafe racer, scrambler, offroad, motorcycle, lifestyle, custom, build, gopro, motovlog, hand made, homemade, upgrade, polish, aluminum, cleaning

Id: EulFzp-C3_k

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2017