Taming This Oily Beast (1 Viewer)

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Oct 24, 2015
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Location
Clarksville, TN 37043
I’ve put this project off as long as I could but the day of reckoning is here. Any suggestions and how I should approach cleaning this oily beast?

Here’s the challenge:

I live in an established subdivision surrounded by neighbors, concrete & grass that I don’t want to kill

The engine was running fine and I have no plans to tear it down.

I plan to replace all of the hoses and belts in a systematic fashion

I’m not experienced enough to be sure I could get all of the emissions related plumbing back on correctly if I did a wholesale removal of it

I plan to protect all the electrical components and carb

What product can I use to clean this thing that don’t have be hose off or alternatively have you come up with a creative way to trap the runoff so It doesn’t run all over the driveway?

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Simple Green and a stiff brush.Spray on,let sit,hit the heavy spots with the brush.Rinse with a hose.Repeat as needed.

Do all this in the neighbors driveway when you know they will be away for a bit :hillbilly:
 
I'd use a putty knife to scrape the big stuff off, catch it all on a cheap Harbor freight tarp or old towel or what ever, then just put the mess in the trash. I'd follow that with straight simple green as posted above.
 
This is my new favorite tool. About 5 bucks at Lowe's or Home Vato. Holds about a quart and you can pump it up and adjust spray pattern from a stream to a fan. Works great with the simple green. Kinda like a mini pressure washer.
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I put mine on a stand and used a putty knife for the clumps of obvious stuff as mentioned above. I then pulled most of the accessories off and started with the normal mix of noxious chemicals. Brake parts cleaner, engine degreaser, and at times, paint remover as my engine had been coated in a rubberized coating at some point. Once I felt it was degreased, I hit it with one more round of brake parts cleaner and then painted with high temp engine enamel. I did all this in my garage with a large metal drip pan underneath.
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If you can find large cardboard boxes they work well capturing the oil and muck but will filter water through (slowly). Then after the boxes have drained simply pickup and put it in the garbage. Go to an appliance store or similar and get some big boxes. Then fab it up so that it is long and low - just tall enough to capture fluid.
 
That doesn't look bad at all! Mine was so caked on you couldn't tell there were freeze plugs in the block! As above, scrape off all the big stuff with putty knife, screw driver, coarse wire brush. I found WD40 worked the best of anything for old baked on grease plus it's not noxious. For the final wipe down I used lacquer thinner etc
 
I picked up a concrete mixing tub from HD and used that to catch all the crude. Started with simple green and not much luck. Then added a steamer....still not much luck, but better. Ended up using EazyOff oven cleaner from Walmart and it worked awesome. Hell, even took off the paint! Clean fresh lemon scent to boot!

Still wire wheeled, wiped down with degreaser, primed then finally painted. It's a process I hope not to repeat in the foreseeable future.
 
I also have that Home Depot mixing tub. It measures 33" x 21" inside. It gets a lot of use for degreasing large parts and doing rust treatment/acid wash on large parts also. When done I mop it out with paper towels or old rags or even use oil dry if it's soupy. It makes a great drain pan too for those times where you just can't control where the fluids go. it's cheap & very useful.
 
Don't worry about the emissions related hoses. There's plenty of info and diagrams in this forum to put it back together, plus the factory service manuals give you enough info. I was worried about it, myself, but it all worked out. During the reassembly I got to fix some of POs mistakes.
 
I live in an established subdivision surrounded by neighbors, concrete & grass that I don’t want to kill

The greasy engine is not the problem.
 
Like other said, scrape off as much as you can first straight into a bag. Purple Power is some amazing stuff works 100 times better then simple green on old grease like this. You could spray on some with a squirt bottle and use news papers like rags to wipe as much off as possible and put in the trash, one of those big bags of rags would work better but cost more. Eventually you will get to the point where you have no choice but to scrub and hose it somewhere, but you could get it pretty clean up to that point. Doing in in the grass once fairly clean works well as at that time it will be more water and cleaner then grease.
 
Thanks everyone. I picked up a selection of cleaning products today. I'll do a product review after I get a chance to try them. I already have a mortar mixing tub. I guess I'll dig it out of storage and put it to use.
 

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