How to Detail your Car Engine

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Bob Osborne with Expert Village. In this clip we are going to be talking about engine cleaning. The couple of things that you really need to be careful of when you are detailing or cleaning an engine most modern vehicles have quite a bit of electronic under the hood, double computers and you got to be really careful because if you get one of these computers wet and it shorts it out, we are talking about serious replacement costs into the thousands of dollars. So the steam cleaning of an engine is really no longer practical. I haven’t steamed cleaned engines for quite a long time. Instead I just used a regular garden hose, degreaser and brushes and I just get into the engine real lightly and carefully so that I do not introduce a lot of high pressure water or steam to the engine, which can cause problems. So we will go ahead and start by just using a little bit of water and wetting down the engine compartment including the base of the hood and the engine itself. After we finish wetting down the engine, we will go ahead and use some degreaser. I spray it fairly liberally, but I am still a little bit careful on some of the component. Be careful when using degreaser in direct sunlight. The sunlight accelerates the action of the cleaner and when it drips down the side of the fenders and it gets on plastic component, make sure that those components aren’t hot because if that’s the case, then you might actually make a mark with it, so wipe off any extra residue. If there was a lot of oil, I would have to recover it somehow. Most states have laws about cleaning engine regardless if it is residential or commercial and it is illegal to drop oil on the ground that goes down the gutter. After you have gone ahead and sprayed the degreaser, I use the paintbrush to agitate. After you have done agitating the degreaser go ahead and rinse. This is a Toyota and Toyota’s are pretty watertight but there are certain models of cars we have to be very careful about when you do this; Jaguar, Porsche and Lexus even have a tendency to breakdown when you put a lot of water under the hood. The best way to dry out the engine compartment after you have done cleaning it is with an air compressor. I get the majority of the water with the air and then I go over it again afterwards with a towel. "