Best way to clean your engine bay?, And promising way too. Options

[ExSane]

Hey guys, as some of you know already the Orlando 6GC meet is this Friday and I want my engine buy cleaned out. What is the best way to clean your engine bay without messing stuff up? I've heard people pressure washing theirs and stuff like that. Also spraying degreaser and then hosing the whole bay. The only problem I am scared of is "rust" due to the water. So I plan on doing it the hard way and getting a tooth brush and some rags and towels. Just need some help to make it less work for me. Thanks guys. I appreciate it ahead of time.

Oh yeah one more thing. My valve cover is painted and as well as my radiator and intake pipe.

This post has been edited by ExSane: Sep 5, 2006 - 2:15 AM

[jgreening]

For a basic clean, engine cleaner and hose off. Stay away from electrical components. If you want it "show car" quality, you will need to do more.

[Insanity-74]

run the engine so its hot........(then turn it off) spray on plenty of degreaser and pressure wash it off taking care around things like the distributor and electronic gismo`s.....then spray the wole thing with WD40 it helps get rid of the water and gives it a nice shine....the heat from the engine dries off all the water pretty quickly.....have done my engine bay this way several times with no problems starting the car afterwards....always with pretty good results.

[vsideboy]

generally you need to run your engine after cleaning it anyway so alot of the water evaporates off, but you could always soak up any pools of water before you run the engine.

Also your engine bay will still get alot of dirt and water in it when the weather is exceptionally bad so don't worry too much about a one off splashing with a hosepipe.

I used an product called CD2 from halfords on mine, heres the result.
before:


after:


the sprayer on my hosepipe has a mist setting, which i use all the time when i am washing my car, (mainly cos we currently have hosepipe bans and this actually uses less than a bucket of water to wash off the entire car!) but I used this to wash off all the old muck and the degreaser once it had done its job, and because its not spraying loads of water then the pooling was kept to a minimum. just mop up any excess with a rag.

It is actually good to be honest cos it shows you were it does pool so I have drilled a couple of small holes through some parts of the engine bay to get rid of water that does happen to get there. NOTE: always paint any bare metal if you are drilling holes so they dont rust!

[Killswitch]

Wait wait wait....so you guy are saying I can spray tons of degreaser and pressure wash my whole motor and it wont screw anything up?

[JoKeRkId613]

^..yes. ive done it to my 7a and it worked fine. just make sure you give it plenty of time to dry up unless u cover up the alternator, distributor, etc.