Practical Engine Building: Step 6: Engine Component Cleaning
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Step 6: Engine Component Cleaning
17.20
| 00:00 | The next step of our 10 step process is one of the simplest, but also one of the most critical and that of course is to clean down all of our parts thoroughly, ready for final assembly. |
| 00:10 | And I can't stress enough just how important it is to make sure that you are super thorough when it comes to cleaning down all of your engine components. |
| 00:17 | It's only going to take a little bit of dirt, debris or grit to quickly damage and potentially even destroy your freshly built engine. |
| 00:25 | This is also an iterative process and generally I'll clean all of my components down at least two if not three or four times, just making sure again that I'm super thorough that all of the parts are in fact completely clean. |
| 00:39 | Not a lot of equipment required here, we are going to be relying on a good supply of brake clean as well as compressed air. |
| 00:46 | And we're also going to use a selection of engine cleaning brushes as well. |
| 00:51 | These are really useful in order to clean out the likes of our threaded holes as well as our oil galleries through the block as well as the crankshaft. |
| 01:00 | So, let's get started here with our engine block. |
| 01:03 | And we're going to clean this down in a number of steps here. |
| 01:06 | Basically, I'm just going to go over the entire block with brake clean and a brush, basically getting rid of any loose debris that I can see. |
| 01:16 | From here, we'll then go ahead and clean down all of our threaded holes and then our oil galleries. |
| 01:23 | We'll flip the engine block over, do the same to the top, we'll clean down our bores and then essentially we'll repeat that process. |
| 01:28 | So, let's just get started. |
| 01:30 | What we're going to be doing here is just using an old paintbrush or a stiff bristle nylon brush will do the same thing. |
| 01:37 | We'll be cleaning down all of our internal and our external surfaces using this brush and our brake clean. |
| 01:44 | Now, it is important when you are doing this to make sure that you are really thorough and get into all of the little nooks and crannies in the block that could end up with debris and grit hidden in them. |
| 01:56 | Although, admittedly, the K20 engine block design is relatively open, so there's not too much chance of collected debris remaining unlike some of the blocks that we've dealt with in our worked examples. |
| 02:18 | Alright, so that's our first pass there, now what I'm going to do is just use our compressed air to blow all of that brake clean off the block and it will take the debris with it. |
| 02:32 | What we'll do now is use one of our engine cleaning brushes here and we'll clean out our main bolt holes for our cradle using our brake clean and again we'll blow these out with compressed air. |
| 02:43 | When we blow these out you do want to be a little bit mindful that it's obviously going to end up with a spray of brake clean coming out. |
| 02:48 | Always a good idea to wear safety glasses while you're doing that. |
| 02:51 | My technique , which you'll see in a moment is to just hold a rag over the top of these while we blow them out and that will prevent the brake clean escaping. |
| 03:05 | Alright, we can now go over the remaining oil galleries that are accessible in the block here, mainly the feeds to our big end bearings, we can also deal with our oil return, oil drains from the deck surface of the block, basically give everything on the lower half of the block another thorough going over. |
| 03:36 | Alright, at this stage I'm reasonably comfortable that the inside of the block we've got access to now is relatively clean. |
| 03:42 | Again it's iterative, we'll have to come back and repeat this process once we've cleaned the rest of the block the first time round. |
| 03:48 | We do tend to get a sense of when the block is properly clean because the brake clean will start running off clear, initially it'll be quite dark as it takes the debris, dirt and oil away with it. |
| 04:00 | So, once it's running clean repeatedly, we've got a pretty good indication that our block is relatively clean. |
| 04:06 | What I'm going to do now is move to the front face of the block and we'll just clean that down as well as the access we've got to our oil gallery. |
| 04:12 | If you haven't already, it is going to be critical to remove the oil gallery plug in order to access this gallery. |
| 04:19 | This has been left out during the machining process by our machinist so we've got easy access there. |
| 04:27 | Alright, we'll now start to rotate the block and we'll begin by giving the exterior of the block a bit of a clean down. |
| 04:33 | Obviously, not quite as critical as the internal surface of the block, but we want everything as clean as we can possibly get it. |
| 04:47 | Ok, we've now got the block rotated so we've got the deck surface face out and we're going to clean down the deck surface as well as our oil gallery holes, we're also going to clean out our head stud holes and we're going to thoroughly clean down the surface of the bores, remembering that these have just been freshly honed and that hone pattern will trap dirt and debris, so it's really important that we are thorough here. |
| 05:10 | Remembering from the body of the course we're going to be using a light coloured rag, lots of brake clean and we're just going to be cleaning these down until our rag actually comes out clean as opposed to a dull grey, which is going to indicate there's still debris there. |
| 05:24 | Important point with cleaning down the surfaces of the bores is that because this is a ferrous liner or sleeve, these will start rusting straight away so it's really important that once we've cleaned this down, we apply a light coat of mineral based oil to prevent that corrosion setting in so let's get started now. |
| 05:51 | OK we'll now move on to cleaning down the bores and just for simplicity, I always like to cut down a smaller section of our rag here so that we're not wasting a huge amount of rag. |
| 06:02 | So, let's clean this down with, or spray a little bit of brake clean directly onto the rag and then what we want to do is just wipe down those bores sort of essentially following the hone pattern angle and that'll allow us to really get into the hone pattern itself and when we pull that rag out, you can see how discoloured that is. |
| 06:21 | So, this normally will take at least two if not three attempts at getting them properly cleaned, so let's go ahead now and complete the rest of the bores. |
| 06:33 | Alright, so we can see just how much dirt and material we've actually removed from those four bores, that's our first attempt, we'll swap to a fresh rag and we'll go again now. |
| 06:45 | So, now we can see our rag has pretty well come out completely clean. |
| 06:49 | So, I would say at this stage, one more attempt after this and we should have really nice properly cleaned bores. |
| 06:57 | Ok, so after three rounds of cleaning our bores, our rag has come out looking nice and clean so I'm happy that the bores are now completely clean. |
| 07:10 | Remember, we do need to oil these, we've got one more face of the block that's still left to clean though and there's not much point applying lubricant to the bores when we're going to still be spraying down brake clean so let's rotate the block and we'll get our final side of the block clean as well. |
| 07:32 | Alright, we've gone through and cleaned all of the block surfaces down. |
| 07:35 | Admittedly, in our demonstration here I've only gone for one pass with everything, obviously with the exception of the bores and as I mentioned this is a bit of an iterative process so generally at least two if not three attempts are going to be required to get everything nice and clean. |
| 07:49 | Just to finish this up here I'll just show you what we're going to do now with our bores. |
| 07:53 | And again this requires us to start with a clean rag and clean mineral based oil. |
| 08:00 | And all I'm going to do is apply some of our mineral based oil to our rag here. |
| 08:05 | And we're just going to make sure we've got a thorough coating of this on each of our bores so let's get that done now. |
| 08:19 | Ok, at this stage we've got our block completely cleaned, we're happy that we've thoroughly removed any dirt and debris and we can move onto cleaning the rest of our components. |
| 08:27 | If the block is going to sit for any period of time before final assembly, we do want to obviously protect that from any other dust or dirt that's in the environment, so a great way of doing this is just to fit a rubbish bag over the block until we're ready to actually build the engine so let's get that done now as well. |
| 08:51 | Alright, let's get our engine block out of the way and we'll deal with the remainder of our components. |
| 08:56 | While we have cleaned the block itself, of course we've still got the cradle or girdle to also clean down and this requires exactly the same amount of attention that we applied to the block. |
| 09:07 | Now, you'll recall that I did mention that for our particular dry sump application we were going to need to drill and tap two of the oil galleries and I'm highlighting those here. |
| 09:17 | So, these are tapped for a tapered pressure plug, but I've got those removed at the moment, of course we need to clean these out because there will be swarf from that tapping process, so let's go ahead and get this cleaned down now. |
| 09:38 | With the cradle, just like our bores, we do have these inserts here, which will rust, these are ferrous, so while we would want to have these cleaned down for final assembly, until we get to that point, again just going to apply a light coat of oil to those ferrous components just to prevent any surface rust occurring. |
| 10:05 | Now, that we've dealt with our cradle, we'll get this out of the way and we can move on and start cleaning down our crankshaft. |
| 10:12 | Moving on to the crankshaft, our task here is to clean down thoroughly all of the general surfaces of the crankshaft, as well as thoroughly cleaning out our oil galleries. |
| 10:20 | And in order to clean out the oil galleries we're going to be using one of our engine cleaning brushes, so let's go ahead and get this done now. |
| 10:27 | Again this will probably take two or three attempts until all of the brake cleaners running off completely clean. |
| 10:50 | Alright, so we've got our crankshaft thoroughly cleaned at this point. |
| 10:52 | Now, it is worth mentioning here that just like our other ferrous components, once we've cleaned any of the protective oil off the surfaces of the crankshaft, particularly the machine journals, obviously surface rust can begin to form quite quickly. |
| 11:06 | Now, while yes we can of course oil this down just like we've done with our bores and store it for later assembly, realistically if we do that we're going to have to go through another process of cleaning, albeit probably a little less thorough than what we've just done. |
| 11:21 | So, my advice here is that I'll always do the final clean of the crankshaft just prior to assembly, so we don't have any problems or chance of that surface rust forming. |
| 11:31 | Now, let's get our crankshaft out of the way and we'll move on. |
| 11:34 | Next, up we're going to deal with our pistons and our wrist pins and obviously we've done quite a bit of balancing work on these pistons so clearly there can be quite a bit of debris trapped in the pistons. |
| 11:45 | What we also want to do is carefully inspect the ring lands themselves, or the ring grooves I should say, particularly where we have the oil drain back holes drilled through the piston. |
| 11:56 | In a lot of pistons I've actually found that there will be sort of a sharp edge of swarf where that hole is being drilled through. |
| 12:04 | In this case with our Wiseco pistons, this looks nice and clean, but in some instances I've needed to use a razor blade just to remove that. |
| 12:10 | This will also become apparent when we actually try and install our oil control ring, because it's not going to fit nicely in the groove. |
| 12:17 | So, we'll have to do a bit better to deal with that now while we are cleaning everything down. |
| 12:20 | Other than that we just want to concentrate on making sure the part is thoroughly cleaned and any of the oil return holes are also sprayed through with brake clean and compressed air. |
| 12:30 | So, let's get our pistons cleaned down now. |
| 12:41 | With our pistons clean we now need to deal with our wrist pins. |
| 12:44 | These are relatively straightforward to clean, the only warning I'll give here is that these again being a ferrous component, will start to form surface rust reasonably quickly. |
| 12:53 | So, typically we would clean these down just prior to assembly. |
| 13:01 | Alright, we've got our pistons and our wrist pins cleaned down, let's get those out of the way and we can move on and deal with our connecting rods. |
| 13:07 | Next, up we're going to clean down our connecting rods, nothing particularly out of the ordinary but pretty basic to clean. |
| 13:14 | In order to do this though, I'm going to remove the cap from the body of the rod. |
| 13:18 | Now, we do need to be mindful of making sure that there's no chance of these getting mixed up. |
| 13:23 | If we check here, you can see that I've simply marked these using a sharpie marker. |
| 13:29 | You can alternatively engrave the conrod number to the body and the cap and this is obviously much more permanent. |
| 13:38 | The way I've done this though, we just need to be a little bit mindful that we don't end up washing off that sharpie mark when we are cleaning down the rod or if we do, at least to reapply it so that there's no chance of these getting confused. |
| 13:49 | Key areas that we want to be mindful of cleaning down with the connecting rod is the threads as well as the hone pattern inside the bushing in the small end. |
| 13:59 | So, let's get our rods cleaned down now. |
| 14:02 | It is worth mentioning here as well that with the majority of high grade aftermarket fasteners, these can be sensitive to hydrogen embrittlement if we're touching them with our bare hands. |
| 14:12 | So, it's always a good idea to make sure that you are wearing latex gloves or similar when you are working with these components. |
| 14:42 | Ok, with our connecting rods cleaned down, we can now get these out of the way and we'll move onto the final item that we're going to deal with here , which is our cylinder head. |
| 14:50 | Our cylinder head has been CNC ported and this was actually supplied back to us cleaned and final assembled ready for installation. |
| 14:59 | However, our policy is always trust but verify and ultimately it's the person doing the final assembly of the engine whose responsibility it is to make sure that everything is properly cleaned, on this basis we have stripped it back down and we will go through and clean it now. |
| 15:14 | One little caveat here though is that because this was final assembled, of course as we can see it's got the valve guide seals installed. |
| 15:22 | This is not something we can remove without potentially damaging them so we're going to leave them where they are. |
| 15:29 | This also limits our ability to remove the valve spring seats because these locate on the guide underneath the valve guide seal, so we can't get those out, that in itself is not an issue, we can still clean around and underneath those valve seats anyway. |
| 15:42 | We do need to always be mindful when we're cleaning down a head where the valve guide seals are still installed that the solvent that we've chosen is not going to damage the valve guide seals. |
| 15:54 | Even here I'd always be a little bit cautious of making sure I'm not actually applying the brake clean or solvent that we're using directly onto the valve guide seal just as a precaution anyway. |
| 16:05 | Other than this, the process is really exactly what we'd expect, we're going to be using our brushes as appropriate in order to clean the head so let's crack on and get the job done now. |
| 16:29 | Alright, so that's our head properly cleaned down, at this point we've got the majority of our key components cleaned, ready for assembly. |
| 16:36 | Now, of course I've only covered the key components here and there will be other parts naturally that do require the same attention as we go through the process. |
| 16:46 | So, it should go without saying here that we should be applying the same exact techniques that we've seen to every single component that we reassemble onto the engine. |
| 16:55 | This might be the oil pump, it could be the sample, even the rocker cover. |
| 17:00 | Really, when it comes to engine building, there's no such thing as too clean. |
| 17:05 | So, without any doubt, it's always worth giving the part another going over and making sure that it is absolutely 100% spotless. |
| 17:13 | At this point we can now move on with the next step of our process. |
