A Complete Guide To Clean Your Car's Engine Bay.
Hey,
guys here today I’m going to show you how to super clean your engine
bay. Super clean that you’ll be able to eat off of it. And no I am not
joking. I got comments from you asking, what’s the best way to clean
your engine? And, I got so many requests from you guys. So that, this
became the most requested topic ever. As usual, I’m going all out in this content. You know different vehicles with different engine compartment setups that are dirty in different ways.
Look here is the drift sting which has a dirty engine that’s covered mostly in grease and oil.
Here is the Jaguar V6, we have the classic daily driver dirty engine bay. That’s just dirty from well driving it daily.
Then there is a truck with a dirty engine that’s covered in mud. Which was from driving through a puddle or two.
And
finally look to this van that’s over 20 years old with over three
hundred thousand miles on her. And, not only is this engine bay dirty.
But we have a bunch of rusted parts that I’m gonna show you how to clean
up, to make this engine look great. The
best part is after following this content you’re going to be able to
super clean any engine and make it look brand new just like you saw. We will use these common products:
We have some microfiber towels, which you buy in bulk because we’re going to be using a lot.- Different brushes & paint markers.
- Cleaning wipes
- Spray wax,
- Trim restore
- And, Soapy water.
- We’re going to prepare the engine to get cleaned
- We’re going to do a dry clean
- A wet clean
- Drive the engine off.
- and at last, we’ll detail it.
Now,
what you want to do next since we’re getting the engine wet you want to
isolate the power source, which is the battery by disconnecting it. And
most of your batteries in the engine bay are easy to remove it because
that’s going to make it so much easier to clean this area over here and
get to the hard-to-reach spaces. But
no matter what even if you keep your battery in the car, make sure you
disconnect the positive and negative leads. We’ll completely isolate the
battery from the rest of the car and the whole point of disconnecting
your battery is peace of mind. Everybody’s
biggest concern when you’re cleaning the engine bay is getting water in
something that you shouldn’t and then it shorts out. But
with the battery completely disconnected there’s no electric running
through any of this, so you can’t short anything out. So there’s a lot
less to worry about and then when we’re done cleaning and detailing the
engine we can make sure everything is dry and then reconnect the battery
and we’ll be good to go.
Finally,
the last thing for our preparation step, even though we disconnected
the battery there are still some components that we don’t want to get
wet. Sure you could get them a little wet but you don’t want to get them
soaking wet. For example, we have
the alternator, we also have the distributor, in the car we could have
two distributors, but what you want to do is you want to follow your
spark plug wires and this is the electronic distributor. If
you want you can press down on the caps and make sure that they’re
forced all the way down that helps keep water out. But these are water
sensitive. Following the spark plug wires we could come over to the
spark plugs and on the engine, the spark plugs are at the top. In
most cases when the spark plugs are at the top you want to be careful
because the water could sit in those spark plug wells, and when water
collects there it doesn’t easily dry out and you could have issues when
we reconnect the battery. So, again these components can get splashed
with water. But the idea is we don’t want to soak them with water if we
could help it.
Another
engine bay that’s becoming a lot more common is one that’s covered in
plastic. And usually, these plastic covers are protecting whatever you
don’t want to get wet. So we just want to make sure we don’t get water
behind the plastic. And with that
being said everything under the hood, is designed to get wet. That’s why
you could drive your car through puddles in the rain without worrying
about anything. The only difference
is we’re going to be spraying water from the top. But we’re going to be
doing so with a light shower, we’re not using a pressure washer.and the
reason why are these connections share their watertight but over time
with heat-cycles with vibrations these become less and less waterproof. So
we don’t want to shoot pressurized water into them. even if it doesn’t
damage the sensor any water that gets in here, even in small amounts
will cause corrosion and then over time you’ll run into issues.
The
one last thing we want to be careful that you don’t really think about
but you definitely don’t want to get water in your engine oil dipstick
sometimes it popped up.so you just want to make sure you push that all
the way in so we don’t get water in the engine oil. The
same thing goes for your brake fluid reservoir make sure it’s
completely tight .and your power steering reservoir again make sure it’s
tight and finally if you have an automatic transmission and a dipstick
make sure that dipstick is pushed all the way in. and with that, we are
done with the preparation step. so let’s move on to the next dry clean step. The
next step is to dry clean the engine and that’s exactly how it sounds
before we get the engineer at all. With the engine completely dry we’re
going to clean it. Reason being is a lot of the dirt and debris that
gets on the engine is just dust and road grime that settles on the top
of everything. So, before we get
water on here and get it completely soaking wet and then that water
pushes the dirt into places we can’t easily reach we’re going to clean
it. And to do that its really simple we’re going to be using brushes.
First,
see there’s a lot of dust gets your dust mask on.and it really doesn’t
matter what brushes you use. I like to use these brushes because they
have a long handle. You could get into those hard-to-reach spaces but we
have a toothbrush, we have regular paintbrushes if that’s what you
could find and then we have metal wire brushes, and in a second, I’ll
describe to you why we’re using that. So these brushes are being used to
agitate all the surface dust.
But
how do you remove that? well, there’s a couple of ways. and it depends
what you have. I personally like using a vacuum. That way you could suck
it up and we’ll also use this later to help dry the engine. But if you
don’t have a vacuum then you could use something like a leaf blower.
Or,
you could use one of these attachments on an air compressor to blow
away all that dust and dirt. Let me show you how this works, we’re using
a vacuum and a brush together, although the dirt here is pretty loose
already and could just be sucked up.
But
where the dirt isn’t least like around the sensors are hard to reach
places work that brushes in there and agitates the dirt. So, it becomes
lose and then you have the vacuum right there just suck it up. You might not think this is doing much.
Look! this is before the dry clean,
And this is after. That’s
all from just using a dry brush. So now you’re going to want to brush
off as many surfaces in the engine bay as you can. This whole process is
pretty quick and it only takes about five minutes. It’s definitely
helpful to have a few different sized brushes. Brushes
are great but it could be hard to reach into the tight spaces. So an
air nozzle like that connects to an air compressor works awesome to get
even more dust out of the engine bay. And look at all that dust getting
blown out. Another option is to use
a leaf blower which also works well. And with some vacuums, all you
have to do is flip the hose around. It’ll blow the air out instead of
sucking it in. That’s all it takes to dry clean an engine. and we get a
lot of the surface dust off the engine before we get it wet. Now I’m
done with this engine it’s completely dry cleans.
But
one thing I want to mention, we have this intake here which is metal
it’s aluminum but it’s in pretty good shape. It’s also a small part of
the engine. On some cars like in
the Jaguar, we have a large metal intake, this is aluminum and you saw
before there’s discoloration on it stains. It’s pitted and corroded and
it doesn’t look good. And since it’s such a big part of how this engine
looks. It’s important that we clean this. Here
we’re going to be using that is, a metal wire brush and it’s pretty
simple. We just rub the metal wire brush back and forth. You could do
this entire job with a metal wire brush. But
this is pretty big so if you have a rotary tool with a metal wire
attachment will make cleaning this a lot easier. It also tends to come
out a little bit shinier when you’re using the rotary tool rather than
by hand. You want to make sure that
you’re careful around any plastic bits, like sensors or rubber hoses.
And look at how much better that looks. Now
once we clean the rest of the engine bay, it’s going to look even
better want to know what here you go this is what it looks like with a
nice and clean engine bay. You can see that aluminum really sets it off
and makes it look great. But you don’t necessarily need to clean this in
every car.
For example, I already super clean the engine in this Ford Fiesta and I didn’t touch the aluminum at all and this still came out great.
And
in this van, the engine bay doesn’t have a lot of aluminum, but what we
do have is aluminum right here for the lettering. and I think if we
polish this up it looked good against the black intake. So
it just takes a few seconds to run the wire wheel across this and clean
it up, really nice. And for just a couple of seconds of work look at
how good that looks and once we clean this up and get that dark black
the silver and black contrast is going to look awesome. and that is all for step two dry cleaning your engine, a couple of brushes dusting the engine off vacuuming it up. And that gets us ready for the next wet cleaning step.
Our third step, the step that gets everybody nervous, is the wet cleaning step. This
is where we take a hose and we wet down the engine bay. But you don’t
have to worry. I’m going to show you everything you need to know, so you
don’t damage your engine. This is actually a lot easier than everyone
makes it out to be. Now, a common
question is, should you clean the engine when it’s warm or cold? The
answer to that is, you could clean it when it’s warm or cold. If you’re
going to clean a warm engine just put your hand on top of it and make
sure you could comfortably keep it there. If it’s too hot just let the
engine cool down. You don’t want to
put cold water on a hot engine because it causes the metals to contract
quickly, and that could either warp or crack engine parts. A
warm engine is definitely better to clean on than a cold one because
all that dirt grime and grease comes off easier when it’s warmer. Just
think about cleaning dishes you clean dishes with warm water, not cold
water. But you can clean an engine when it’s cold. In this case, I’ll be
cleaning a cold engine. So you’ll see how it comes out. Let me show
you what we’re going to be using to clean it. Again
not too many materials. We have our hose, we have the cleaning wipes,
soapy water, a garbage bag, some microfiber towels, an assortment of
brushes, and pipe cleaners.
The
first thing we’re going to do is grab our garbage bag because we’re
going to be cleaning the top first. We’re going to be working our way
top to down, everybody forgets to the hood. but that’s a pretty
important part. So what you want to
do is to cover the bulk of the engine. You don’t want a lot of water
getting on top of the engine. It’s okay to get off to the sides. But you
definitely don’t want to soak the top of the engine. This
goes for any engine you’re cleaning, whether in a truck, an engine that
already has a plastic cover or an engine that’s mostly covered by the
wiper shroud. you should always cover the engine to play it safe. So,
for the wet clean process first, we’ll clean the hood. And then we’ll
clean the outside of the engine bay, then we remove the garbage bag and
clean the actual engine itself.
So
let’s get back to the must thing to start cleaning the hood. First, you
want to hose down the painted surfaces on the hood and that garbage bag
is working great to keep that engine dry. Since our hood liners dirty
rinse that off as well, but if your hood liner is sagging or looks
delicate don’t get it wet because water only makes it worse. Look this
one’s in good shape so have no problem spraying it down. Next,
grab a degreaser like soapy water and spray down the hood liner and
painted surfaces. With the microfiber towel simply wipe down the painted
surface and remove the dirt and grease. it should come off pretty
easily.
If
your hood liner is really dirty use some carpet cleaner and lets it
soak. Carpet cleaner works great on hood liners. Finally, rinse
everything down with water and watch all the dirt away.
Now you can still see some stains over here I’ll show you how to fix that in our last step. But for now, let’s go clean the engine bay. Before
removing the bag we want to clean the entire outside of the engine bay.
So pick a side to start on. I’m going to start and work my way around
the first to rinse down the part of the engine bay to remove all the
surface dirt. Don’t use a high-pressure jet-setting which could force
water into electrical connectors. Next,
grab a cleaning wipe and wipe down the easy-to-reach surfaces. The
cleaning wipes not only absorb the dirt but it helps to remove the oils
and grease. You could tell this is getting clean because check out how
dirty the wipe is. We want to rinse
away all that dirt that we loosened up. And then grab your favorite
degreaser. In this case, I’m using soapy water which is just a squirt of
dish soap and the rest filled with warm water.
Generously
spray down the entire area and I like using dish soap because it’s
strong enough to clean the grease. But it also won’t degrade the metal
or the rubber or plastic surfaces in the engine bay. Then grab a brush
and wipe down every surface that you could reach. The
more surfaces that you could brush the cleaner the finished products
going to be. So, for any really tight spots, you could grab your pipe
cleaner and these works awesome for getting into those spots that you
can’t normally get into. And
finally, we just loosened up all that dirt which is still sitting in
that engine bag. So, to remove it rinse it away with the hose now repeat
this process for the rest of the engine bay. Spray it down, wipe it
down rinse spray the degreaser agitate with a brush and then rinse it
all away. Each side should take about five minutes to thoroughly clean. And it’s really not difficult to do.
And
with everything around the engine bay cleaned up, now we want to
carefully remove that bag, so you don’t get water all over the engine. Look the bag trick does a great job at keeping your engine dry. At
this point, we’re at the hardest part of this whole process. We’re
going to be cleaning the engine and we have a big v8 engine here so we
have a lot of areas to cover. If
you have a smaller four-cylinder engine it’s a lot quicker. But as you
can tell we have a ton of hoses and wires and just a lot of little
crevices to get into to get this clean. So that could get overwhelming
real quick. But I have a bunch of tips and tricks that I’m going to show
you.
To make it so it’s not that bad, and the first one has split the engine down the middle and pick a side to start cleaning on. So
I’m going to start on the passenger side and I’m going to be working my
way from the front to the back. And the tricky part to this is we can’t
use a hose to rinse down the engine. So, we need to have good access to
clean the engine. But you could
see we have this intake in the way. And you can just work around it but
it’s pretty big and it’s made difficult to clean here.
So
let’s remove it just disconnect the two sensors pop off a couple of
hoses and remove the intake which gives us a lot more room. And the
benefit is that we could clean this out of the car. More importantly, now we have a lot more access to the passenger side of the engine. So I’m cleaning the actual engine.
First,
clean off any grease and oil with your cleaning wipes. We have a pretty
thick layer of grease here but it’s coming right off with the wipes. Removing
the thick grease like this is going to help the engine cool more
efficiently because grease acts as a layer of insulation between the
engine and the cold air around it. Check out all that grease we removed.
Next,
spray down the area with soapy water, and since we’re only using a fine
mist we don’t have to worry about damaging anything. So you could spray
it everywhere.
Then
use a brush to agitate all the dirty surfaces and for any surfaces that
you can’t reach. You can use the pipe cleaners and get into the really
tight spaces. If you don’t have a pipe cleaner to clean the
hard-to-reach areas and the little tight surfaces. I’m gonna show you something to use that everybody has, and that is a toothbrush.
So
wet down the surface and the stiff bristles do a good job at educating
that dirt and cleaning it out. A toothbrush also works really well on
those tough to clean wiring harnesses. After
loosening up all that dirt, we need to somehow remove it. With all the
other parts of the engine, we just used the hose and rinsed it all away.
But unfortunately, we have a lot of electronics. we have the spark
plug holes and just things we don’t want to get soaking wet.
So, instead of using the hose, we’re going to be using a microfiber towel and we’re going to wipe everything down. That way the towel is absorbing both the soapy water and the dirt and grease we loosened up. So
basically we’re cleaning and drying at the same time. and you can’t
worry about getting the microfiber towel dirty, that actually means that
you’re wiping away the grease. You
could deffer that is what a new microfiber towel looks like and what
the other one that we’re drying with looks like. So instead of all the
grease being stuck on here, it’s getting sucked up into our microfiber
towel. Now some spaces like back in there are really difficult to get into. so a little trick grabs
your pipe cleaner and then grab your microfiber towel and wrap it in
the pipe cleaner and now you could force your pipe cleaner back there
and make it easier to get to the hard-to-reach spaces. Alright, with all that dirt and grease gun and cleaned up check that out that is looking so good. And we haven’t even detailed it yet. So that’s just clean once we detail, it’s going to look brand-new. So I’m just gonna real quick clean this up just like we did the other side. And with that our engine and engine bay are clean. So let’s move on to the next step.
Now
after cleaning we’re left with a wet engine bay so grab a microfiber
towel a nice clean one and start drying everything down. This
is actually a pretty important step. You want the engine to be
completely dry before we move to the next step which is detailing. And
one thing you’ll notice as you’re drying your towel is going to start
getting dirty. So you’re also picking up that extra dirt that you might
have left behind. And as you’re drying, you might see a spot that we totally miss, so just get in there with your
towel if you need to grab some soapy water and clean it up. And
finally, as you’re drying, you might encounter a spot where you have
puddled water and also missed too. Make sure you dry those areas out
good because you don’t want any standing water for when we put the
battery back in.
So get your towel in there and absorb it or a little trick that works really well if you have a vacuum just sucks that water right out. So dry the entire engine bay absorbing as much water as you can. There we go with our engine completely dried. We are ready for our last step which is easily the most rewarding step. Our final step is the detailing step. But
before we detail the engine bay don’t forget we have to detail the hood
now washing this hood didn’t come out as clean as I wanted it to. One
thing you could do which looks awesome is pop off these clips and remove
the hood liner.
Since
we already clean this and it’s completely dry. I’m going to be using a
black non-flammable fabric dye to restore the hood liner.
Obviously,
you don’t have to do this if your hood liner isn’t bad. But this is
going to make a huge difference for mine and also they discontinued this
for my car. So you can’t even get a new one if you wanted. And this is
turning out nicely. Now as we let this dry let’s detail the rest of the
hood.
Grab
your favorite spray wax and just spray all the painted surfaces. We’ll
go all the way around. After we’re done spraying, grab a microfiber
towel and we’re just going to buff in that spray wax, right into that
paint. Since we have our spray wax
already now we could spray down all the painted surfaces in our engine
bay. And then buff that wax into the paint. And this is not only going
to protect the paint but it’s going to make it a deeper colored.
Now
that all our painted surfaces in the engine bay are detailed. It’s time
to detail all the rubber and plastic surfaces. And in order to do that
we’re going to be using a water-based trim restorer. This
dries non-greasy so it won’t collect dust. It restores the deep black
color in the rubbers and plastics. And it actually protects the rubber
and plastics as well. And a mistake
I see all the time please don’t do this, don’t use wd-40, don’t use
motor oil, don’t use any oily or greasy products in your engine bay. Not
only is it going to collect dust, but it’s gonna damage the plastics
and rubbers. So don’t use these.
Be
sure to use a trimmer store that’s safe on plastics and rubber. And
what I like to do I like to pour a bunch of the trimmer store in one
little spot like that. Then grab a clean brush get some trimmer store on
your brush and we’re going to start on one side and work our way
around. So we’ll start back and start brushing it into the plastics and
rubber. As you spread the product thinly and there’s not enough just dab
your brush into more and spread it around. Right now don’t worry about getting smooth coverage just make sure everything you want to be covered is covered. On
complex surfaces like the top of the distributor, the brush is gonna
make it possible to get complete coverage. Just spend some time and work
it in there good.
And
when you’re doing this you wanna make sure that you don’t apply any
product to the belt by mistake. Any product that gets on the belt cause
the belt to squeak or even worse slip. After you’re done applying the
product early let it sit and soak for about 10 minutes. After letting
this sit for a few minutes grab your microfiber towel and buff off all
the plastic pieces that we put trimmer store on. The
idea is we let the products soak into the pores of the plastic and
rubber. We’re removing that top layer so it doesn’t collect dust and so
we could even it out. You could basically rub down every surface you
touched with the brush. To keep track of the parts you buffed with the
towel. I work on one side of the engine, and then when I’m done I move
to the other. Now after buffing the entire engine bay, this is looking amazing! check that out. and you could stop here.
But,
I have one more step that I like to do using paint markers to really
set this apart. And what we want to do is, we want to look around the
engine bay and just look for parts that look rusted or both that just
don’t look good.
For example, there’s one right here. a rusted bolt like this just ruins the look of your perfectly clean engine compartment. So
grab a metal wire brush and just clean off that rust and then grab your
paint marker and cover that rust in black paint. And I know that
doesn’t seem like much but a little details like that make all the
difference.
And
since we have the paint markers out, I have one more quick tip that’s
really going to make a difference and that is working with faded
lettering. Although this doesn’t look that bad this washer fluid the
only cap is faded. So you can grab
your paint marker and just color the raised letters only, and look at
that. Attention to detail like that is really set your engine bay apart
from everybody else’s. And with that. Man, just look at the engine, it’s
so clean we are almost done. We just need to put a couple pieces in that we took out so let’s go do that. Let’s
add our cleaned intake, and our cleaned battery, and we can’t forget
about our hood insulation, that looks so much better than before. Look
at that and just to test the car starts up with no problems, no check
engine lights. There you go and that is how you clean your engine bay. This takes about two hours total to do. And it’s really simple. Just take your time and have fun with it.
and you’ll get results just like this. This
engine looks brand new. not only does this look good but all the rubber
and the plastic is protected. plus you have an engine bay you could be
proud of. If you really wanted to it’s so clean you could eat off of it.
As
well as all the products I used in this descriptions are linked, so you
could easily find them. Hopefully, the topic was helpful if it was
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