Hey guys welcome back to legit street cars in this video, i'm going to show you how to properly clean pistons and cylinder heads. So they go from looking like this to looking like this and from looking like this to looking like this, and any one of you guys can do this at home. I'm just gon na spend a few dollars on household cleaning items literally like a toothbrush and some some. This is basically floss.

It's wax string and that's how we're gon na get this engine looking shiny and clean, so it's ready for assembly. So with that, let's just get started, i'm really excited to show you guys the wax string trick, because i've never seen anyone else do this, but it's vital in properly cleaning the pistons, while they're still in the engine. So, anyway, the first step of cleaning our engine in this case is definitely a vacuum. Get the knock sensor out of the way, and this coolant tube just pulls right off.

It's going to use a screwdriver to agitate all this dirt and kind of scaly rust from this cast iron block. All right. We've got the valley clean enough for this video, prepping and painting a block is for another video. So before we get to cleaning the pistons on this engine, i want to show you a piston, more specifically the side of the piston and the rings.

So an integral part of this cleaning process is going to be protecting the cylinder walls and the piston rings from accumulating dirt and debris which will scratch the cylinder walls. So we need to make a seal around our piston right at the top and here's a melted piston from my turbo ls motor that i'm showing you for absolutely no reason other than this is really really cool. Carnage, run good fuel and get a good tune. People.

So what we need to seal is this tiny little gap around the piston, so dirt and debris doesn't get stuck in there and then scratch the cylinders as the piston moves up and down. So our first step is a good vacuum job, so i just have a normal shop vac and then we need to concentrate that suction into a small area. So i'm just using a regular funnel and now we have a tiny little suction attachment at the end of our vacuum, all right. So after i went around and just vacuumed each cylinder out, i'm just going to give them a little wipe right now with everything vacuumed out and cleaned, we're going to use a little bit of engine assembly grease and that's just going to go right around the pistons And we're just going to make a seal all the way around and if you have white lithium grease that would work also - and this is made specifically to lubricate engine parts when you're putting it together.

So i like to use this around the pistons and you only need a really thin layer, so we can reuse a lot of this, so we'll go ahead and put some right here as well. Just all the way around doesn't have to be perfect as long as you see that gap kind of sealed up in there and you get that around the cylinder a little bit as well you're good. Next, we have to plug the oil galleys in the block. So i'm using a sponge window seal kit, i got for like five bucks, so we're just gon na cut a little section off then we're gon na take a piece of black electrical tape and we're gon na.

Stick it right in the middle and then give this guy a little roll just like this. So at this point we have created a plug and we can pull it right out with our piece of tape. All right, then, we're going to take this and we're going to plug up the oil galleys, and in this case this is where the oil drains down, but nonetheless any kind of oil galley you want to plug up, because you don't want to get any dirt and Debris inside of the crank case, even if you're going to change your oil a couple times after and even though we have oil filters, probably going to catch most of the debris, but for a few cents we can make little plugs like that. So i had the three oil galleys plugged up, and now we have this guy just one last one.

This is what feeds the engine oil into the cylinder head. This little guy would have been perfect for an ear plug. This is basically the same material as ear plugs. I'm just going to go ahead and remove the dowel pins here that help us install the cylinder heads there.

We go okay, so many people have commented to clean engines with oven and grill cleaner and that's okay. To do with an iron block and coated pistons, but it's not safe on aluminum, which i'll talk to you more about when we clean the aluminum cylinder heads. So if your engine is aluminum definitely use the more expensive, gasket remover spray, but i'll show you what oven cleaner does on an iron block because it works well and it looks cool now. I don't want to just go nuts and spray this everywhere and get it inside of the engine the coolant jackets, it might be.

Okay, there's just no reason for that when we have toothbrush technology - and this has kind of a thick consistency to it. So it'll stay on the brush and then we can just wipe it in so some of it's going to get in there we're just not going crazy and spraying it directly inside of the engine, and we just want to saturate the top surface here and it'll start Doing its thing and when the oven cleaner starts to work, you can see it bubbling away. It's very satisfying. I don't know if you can hear this on camera, but there's like a little snap, crackle pop just like rice, krispies cereal, these bubbles, kinda look like little rice, krispies, i'm gon na.

Let ez off do its thing for about five minutes and then we're gon na use a plastic razor blade to clean it. But before we get to that, i got ta. Let you know that omaze is giving us the chance to win a 2022 bmw. M5 cs.

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So with aluminum blocks i can usually get away with just the plastic razor blades, but i'm seeing a little bit of gasket material here, so we can go ahead and use a steel razor blade in this case, but just go at it at an angle like this, You don't want to gouge it again. This is cast iron, we're probably going to be fine, no matter what, but i'm mostly referring to being gentle on the aluminum blocks. So you can see here the plastic. One probably won't get this off now we're gon na.

Definitely do a coolant flush on the engine after it's all put back together, because some of this debris will get inside. You can go nuts and block off every single galley if you'd like, but i just like to be gentle around any of those ports and kind of just scrape up and away from them. And there is the debris at this point: we're just going to use a little bit of carbon choke cleaner on a rag i'm just going to start wiping this cylinder head surface. This will give us a good idea if anything is left.

If you see a little bit of staining from the gasket, don't worry about it, you don't need to grind this off and start getting violent with a drill and a wire brush. The only time you're ever going to see this without the gasket staining is, if it's a brand new block or if it just got back from the machine shop and they milled or decked the surface all right at this point, the deck is looking really good. It's perfectly smooth we're going to give it one final step, and that is with some 2000 grit sandpaper. So this is on kind of a harder foam block.

So it's perfectly flat. You can use wd-40 engine fogging oil or any light oil just spray it on there, and i'm just going to do one of these and keep in mind that the grease that we put around the pistons and inside the cylinders are catching any dirt and debris. Right now and then we're just going to wipe them smooth so they're going to prevent the dirt and debris from going between the piston and the cylinder wall, which is what we want all right. There's that shiny, look that everybody wants to see, but that isn't actually always the most important thing.

We got a lot less of the gasket staining and uh yeah. This thing is looking good all right, so we're all done with the deck surface of the black, and let me just show you this is just staining no material at all is going to come off. This is perfectly smooth and ready for a head gasket all right. So at this point we want to wipe out these cylinders because we need to move the pistons up and down by hand to get them at top dead center.

So we're going to remove all of our grease and it's caught all of our debris for us and we can already start to see some of these pistons are getting clean here. So a little bit of the oven cleaner made its way into the piston. Look at that, oh, this is going to be so good at this point. We're just going to go ahead and vacuum up the remaining grease and don't worry if you don't get all of it, we're just getting that top layer that had any of the debris all right, so we're gon na get this piston up to top dead center.

For a cleaning - and you want it all the way up and right there right when it stops moving, you know that's as far up as it can go all right, it's time for the good old-fashioned string trick and by good old-fashioned i mean i've never seen anyone Else do this um, it's just something i came up with and it works really well. So, of course, i need to show you guys. So what we're using here is wax string. This isn't just regular string, it's a little bit thicker than wax floss, almost the same, but anyway.

What we're going to do here is place. This string in between the piston and the cylinder wall, like so and the size string that i bought is perfect for this, and the reason we want it to be wax string is because now we're going to have a very solid physical barrier between the piston and The cylinder wall, so, if you use a normal string, whatever you're using to clean with, might deteriorate that string right away where the wax is going to hold up a lot better. And it's going to stay stuck inside of here. Until we pull it out and make sure you're using a plastic wedge or the plastic razor blade would work so you're, not scratching anything up and we're just going around and pressing it in this groove just like so should only take you about a minute to fully Protect each cylinder well worth it: okay, now we're going to get to a point where we have a little bit of overlap and then tuck that overlap in over the other string, and this is where we're going to pull it up when we're done - and this is What it looks like when you're done, you can barely even tell it's here and it's not blocking any of the piston, so that means we can get it clean all the way to the edge.

Okay. At this point, we're going to spray our easy off right on that piston right on that carbon and let it do its thing. So this really does clean up the piston. In no time you can kind of agitate it a little bit just to get it in that carbon really nice, and since we have our wax in there, we can go right up to the edge here and we're going to be fine, we're using a toothbrush.

It's not going to damage anything and we're being ultra safe, safer than most okay. That's agitated i'll go ahead and let it sit for a few minutes and give it another scrub down the initial wipe. After doing this is super satisfying, as you could imagine all right. After a few minutes and a couple scrub downs with this toothbrush, let's see what we got.

It's the final wipe look at that, so pretty so clean all right. Cool now, you're gon na have a little bit of the wax residue on the cylinder. That's not gon na damage. Anything and what's nice is not only.

Is it easiest to clean the piston when it's at top dead center, but the only place this has to go now is down go down, pushing it with my finger or peter's. So, as you can see here, it is almost perfectly clean in there there's really nothing just a little bit of a wax ring and a little bit of the grease that we use that was left over so perfectly smooth. We didn't grind anything into the piston rings, which would eventually have chewed up our cylinder wall so i'll just give it a final wipe all right. So we went from this a dirty deck surface, carboned up pistons all the way to this.

So here is our final results: all of the carbon has been removed. Our deck surface is perfectly clean and smooth, and just like, i was telling you guys with the deck surface, you don't have to go crazy with a wire wheel. Making this look like it's chrome. You don't want to do that with the piston either.

So a lot of factory pistons are coated and this coating helps retain the heat in the combustion chamber. So this area right in here, so it reduces the amount of heat that travels into the actual piston and that makes for a more efficient running engine. So if you were to take a wire wheel right now to this, you would remove this coating and it would look chrome and it would look shiny, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice all right before we clean up the cylinder, heads and check them for straightness. We're going to check the deck here with our straight edge, so this is a straight edge with a perfectly machined side that is covered by this plastic protector.

So this is what you want to use on the engine, not this side. Here, that's coated all right, so the shiny side is going to go down. So what we're going to do here is we're simply going to rest this on the deck of the engine like so now we can do is we can take a flashlight and kind of shine it at the other side? So here's my flashlight and we don't see any light going through so that's good, but to properly check tolerance we need a feeler gauge, so we're just going to kind of go around here and i can already tell this is perfectly straight. It's rare that you warp an iron block.

You can definitely warp a cylinder head, especially an aluminum cylinder head, but very difficult to mess up an iron block, all right. So we'll come here to the bottom and we're going to do the same thing and in some cases you can see the warpage - and this looks perfect. So right now we're using a 2 000 of an inch feeler gauge or 0.05 millimeter and it's very very thin. All right so then we're just going to put our protective sleeve on in between checking the deck and the cylinder heads you want to be really careful.

This is a precision tool, so it's important how you store this. You don't want to store it like this believe it or not. It can start to warp and bend itself. Do you want to store it just like this, this flat side down it wouldn't be the end of the world if it was like this, but this is technically the proper storage method? Okay, so i've already blown out all of the holes where the head bolts go.

You want to clean out those threads really well, and the last step before heads can go back on are dowel pins. We need to push these back in, so you start them off by hand just like that, make sure they're straight and then you need to tap them in with a hammer, but it's very important: you don't use a steel hammer or you can mushroom those out. So i really like these mallets from sonic because they have a different hardness on each end, so we'll go ahead and use the larger of the two and we're simply just going to tap these guys in just like that and they'll bottom out, all right all right. So we're done with that we're ready to move on to the head.

But before that i got ta, let you guys know sonic is having a crazy father's day, blowout sale. So this goes until june 12th and you can get up to 30 off sonic tools and their amazing foam organization system, which has been a game changer for me in the world of tool. Storage, because i was really really bad at keeping things organized and you can't mess this up, so these are some of the best tools on the market and they're having a massive sale so check out the link down below next up we're gon na clean up these Cylinder heads and then we're gon na check the mating surface, the bottom surface here for flatness, with the straight edge just like we did on the deck before we clean these we're gon na remove the cam, and you want to go in a reverse torque sequence here. So we're going to hit the outside bolts first and then work our way in all right.

So at this point we can use our gun and zip these out and now on this last one. We should see these valves close up. If you guys are around for the lightning engine, disassembly video, you know we have a stuck spark plug and the reason it's stuck is just because there is so much dirt around the plug. I already got a lot of it out, but it's literally blocking the socket from going on.

I think i've disturbed enough of it. There we go now, it's clicking on. There should come out now. Yes, we did it look at that.

Yeah, not cool all right. So, with the cams off, we can start to clean the combustion chamber and the gasket sealing surface on the cylinder heads, and we have a few different options here. As far as chemicals to help us clean and easy off in this case is probably not the best one, because it contains sodium hydroxide and that reacts violently with aluminum and can discolor it. And if you leave it on there for a long time it can actually kind of eat it away um.

So when we're cleaning the coated pistons, those are aluminum but they're coated. So this doesn't get through at all. No damage no risk there and it's a cast iron block, so no issues there, but when it comes to bare aluminum, unless you're gon na go rinse this off right away, um, probably not your best option. So, in this case, we're just going to go with good, old-fashioned, carb and choke cleaner brake.

Cleaner would work well for this as well, and then we're going to test out this really expensive, gasket remover. So we'll do these two with the gasket remover and this stuff looks like milk don't drink it and if it can remove gaskets, it should be pretty good at removing carbon buildup, but we'll try it out on the gasket surface as well, see what happens and now Good old-fashioned carbon choke on this side, look at that and we'll just get in there and kind of agitate things with our brush our toothbrush and like the carbon choke even does a good job at removing some of this gasket material too. Carbon choke is a jack of all trades. That's for sure this stuff, i'm not sure.

If it's a jack of any trade. No, i don't know, i guess it's doing something all right. Let's see what we got here, we're going to use the plastic razor blade on the aluminum. I want to be gentle here and it definitely looks like this.

Gasket remover is helping okay, not bad for a first pass, but we still have a lot to get off. It's cleaning up the combustion chambers actually pretty well, i got ta say look at that: that's nice yeah! So we're getting a lot of the big chunks off here with the plastic razor blade. I've used similar products before the factory stuff from mercedes and a few other brands, but this stuff i just picked up at the local, auto parts store and it's working great. What is this? Oh, it's permatex all right, all right guys.

I've been going at it with the plastic razor blade for quite some time. So let's wipe this off and yeah. Overall, i got ta say not super impressed, considering the cost and considering that i'm completely out it's just it's empty right. Now we couldn't even do one entire cylinder head so yeah i wouldn't buy this.

It's too expensive didn't do that good of a job overall and we still have lots of little chunks here. I know it's tempting just to go, get a wire wheel and be done with it, but this is aluminum. You can ruin this and gouge. It you'll make a little divot and then the head gasket won't seal.

But if we use some 2000 grit and some light oil we'll be able to get this really nice and you could probably go a lot more aggressive with the sandpaper. I know there's some people that use you know two 300 grit to do the same thing, but i rather put a little bit more work into it and just make sure the surface is perfectly smooth, then risk anything all right here. We go first wipe after some light. Sanding very nice just have a couple little gasket stains here and there, but it's looking good now.

I just want to show you this, though this is a metal razor blade, we're not going to actually use this to clean the head because it can scratch it. Okay, i'm just showing this to you guys that this spot right here that you might think you need to grind away with a wheel. There's nothing there! It's just a stain! You can't feel anything, nothing all right. So i'm going to go ahead and use the carbon choke on this side too.

Just to give it a nice clean these i normally use as detail brushes. They work really well on all sorts of things like being really gentle with an aluminum cylinder head, but also cleaning around the valve nicely all right, looking good all right, i just got done with this side here, give it a wipe, looking good and we'll give it A spray and looking better hey all right. I have done this quite a few times just trying to get it as shiny and as clean as possible, keeping it well lubricated, but i think we are done all right, so we went from this all the way to this and again any one of you guys Can do this at home and if you wanted to get some of the staining from the head gasket out, you pretty much have to get this milled. But as long as your cylinder head is perfectly smooth, you cannot feel this at all.

It's 100 smooth as long as it's smooth and as long as you use your straight edge and measure, and it's within tolerance. You can save that money, you don't have to send it to a machine shop, spend a few hundred dollars and a lot of these machine shops take forever to get you your parts back. So if you're just doing a head gasket job. This is definitely the way to go so with that.

It is all cleaned up. Let's just check the surface for warpage with our straight edge and we're good to go all right. Let's go ahead and gently rest, our flat edge on the flat surface of the head and make sure it's perfectly flat, put a little light pressure from your hand, nothing crazy and guys we're using a feeler. That's two 000 of an inch thick.

So there are some engine builders that will go with about double this and that tolerance is okay, so every engine is different. There are manufacturer specifications for this, but two thousandths of an inch is definitely playing it safe and this guy is perfectly flat. So again, if you guys haven't been following the series, my svt lightning had bad head gaskets, it was starting to eat coolant and it would overheat, but i never actually let it overheat. I would see the gauge start creeping up and we had some pretty clear signs.

Uh that there were head gasket issues because it was pressurizing, the cooling system and coolant was spewing all over the place. So i didn't drive it like this. I didn't drive it overheat. It or anything like that.

So in the situation that someone does and i've seen this when i worked for the dealer, we would have clients that, honestly, they just didn't know about a cooling gauge. They don't know anything about cars and they would just drive these things. Pegged at that point with an aluminum head, you can warp it, and sometimes you got to replace the head. Sometimes you have to send it out to get milled um and then you potentially run into issues where you have to get a thicker head gasket to make up.

So you know, there's a lot of complexities with that. Not every situation is the same, but in our case and i'll go ahead and measure the bottom as well. We are perfectly flat and this head is going to seal up just fine, so i will not be cleaning this side of the engine or the other cylinder head in this video, mostly because it's repetitive, the purpose of this video was to show you how to properly Clean pistons and cylinder heads and we've done that the other side is exactly the same, and also because, when i first started filming this very video that you just watched, i discovered something catastrophic with this engine which is going to require me to rip it all. Apart and i may need an entire new engine, so i'm going to save that for the next svt lightning series um, because i'm not exactly sure what i'm going to do with it.

I just had to kind of move on with my day and continue with the video that i had planned out for you guys, so i have a little bit of thinking to do and it'll all be in the next svt lightning video. So with that, i hope you guys really enjoyed this one. I hope you learned something. I hope this gives you the confidence to tackle a job like this at home.

You can replace head gaskets, you don't have to send everything to a machine shop and spend a ton of money so with that, if you enjoyed the video, give it a big thumbs up share the video with your friends subscribe if you haven't already and most importantly, Have an awesome day, i'll catch all of you in the next video you.