Sam Battersby talks about the big challenge of detailed engine cleaning.
Enjoy.
AM:What are some of the challenges in detailing the engine bay?
SB:We’ll spend a lot of time under the hood, as the judges will. Often the tough part about detailing engine bays on concours vehicles is that you don’t want to introduce water, normally. In an engine bay like this on a car this age, not everything has the corrosion protection that today’s cars do. It’s easy to get water into areas that you’re not going to be able to get it out of, risking rust and other issues. I’ll start by wiping down all the basic stuff that’s easy to get to, sometimes we’ll use a detail spray for that process. We’ll start with fender liners and wheel wells, then all your caps and reservoirs are usually pretty easy to get to.
We’ll use a selection of brushes, these have pretty flexible boar’s head bristles that are good for getting into carburetors and stuff. Usually I’ll have a cart with several different brushes and swabs on it and that’s when I’ll buckle down and start spending the time doing all the tedious stuff. Typically for oily or greasy parts, I’ll soak them with a cleaner, let them dwell, then agitate with a brush and if it’s in a spot where we can blow it out with air, I’ll do that into a towel so it’s catching all the dirt.
FD:A lot of the time, the disassembly is more involved than the cleaning. If we decide that the engine block is dirty and we have to pull the rack of carburetors off to get inside and clean it, then we’ll do that. Cleaning and mechanical work are really intertwined in concours prep.
SB: That’s one of the things you can really get docked for, if you’ve been lazy about cleaning something inside the engine bay that may not necessarily be easy to get to, but you can see it.
