cleaning, cleaning, cleaning

I actually managed to get out of bed at a reasonable hour today, with the intention of working on Peanut. I'm buying a house, and so now I have a deadline for getting Peanut up and running, so that I can drive her down to the new place at the beginning of July, instead of having her towed in her current non-functioning condition.

Rather than trying to fit myself into the six inches between the clothes dryer and Peanut to do this work, I found an old comealong that my Dad had given me, and used it to hook up the center tow hook on my Honda Prelude to Peanut's tow bar. The little Honda did a nice job of pulling Peanut out into the sunlight.

Step One was to finish draining the block. After about a half hour of looking around and flipping through various manuals and web sites, I finally gave up on finding the block's petcock and got out the shopvac. A few minutes at each of the holes into the water jacket sucked out a good portion of the remaining coolant in the block.

Step Two was to finish cleaning up the top of the block. I walked down to the local Home Depot and picked up a couple of medium-fine bastard files and a straightedge. The files were carefully used with some WD-40 to get the block all nice and shiny and flat. Then I checked the flatness with the straightedge.

Step Three was to clean up the mess in the cylinders that all that filing and earlier sanding had caused. This involved many, many, many iterations of spraying GUNK Engine De-Greaser into the cylinders, turning the engine over using the fan blades, and wiping down what got deposited on the cylinder walls.

While performing Step Three (did I mention the many, many iterations), I noticed that some fuel was splashing from the bit of fuel line sticking up above the engine into the #1 cylinder. Below where the fuel had splashed, the gunk that had built up on the piston head had been washed away. So I took the hint and filled up the cylinders with gasoline and let them soak while eating some lunch.

After lunch, I cranked the engine so that each piston in turn was flush with the block, then very carefully scraped off the gunk from the tops of the piston heads. After that, not only were the piston heads concave as they should be, but I can see a stamp of "0.080" on the top of each one.

This was followed by some more of Step Three, with the addition of filling each cylinder up with about a half inch of engine de-greaser, letting it soak a bit, then vacuuming it out with the shopvac, to get any little bits of metal or whatever that might have collected in the cylinder.

I then cleaned off the top of the block again and oiled up the block and the cylinders with some engine oil, giving the engine a few more cranks to properly coat the cylinders.

That was about all I could do to prep the engine, as the only things left to do are to tap out the bolt holes (which requires borrowing a tap from work) and cleaning up the bolts (which I think I'll just buy replacements for). So I moved on to cleaning the interior. Which was a disgusting mess, as mold had taken quite a foothold due to my neglect.

I mixed up a solution of about 10% laundry bleach and 90% hot water, put on a mask, and got to wiping. The stuff that I didn't think was salvageable (carpet, carpet pad, cardboard door panels) went into the trash. I wiped down the headliner, seatbelts, some of the seat covers, and pretty much anywhere I saw grey puffs or black spots. I pulled up the rear of the bench seat to get at the nastiness that had infested the carpet-padded speaker boxes as best I could (those weren't looking too good; I'll probably have to replace them). I cleaned what I could, although I will definitely have to take apart the seats again to clean out the cab; I forsee a visit to a pressure washer in the future.

I put everything away, cleaned out the shopvac, and used the Honda to push Peanut back into the garage and out of the inevitable Seattle rain. Then I took a shower to clean off all the mold and chemicals.

And now it's dinnertime.