Transcript
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Hey guys ChrisFix here and today
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I’m going to show you how to super clean your engine bay so clean that you’ll be able to eat off of it and
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No, I am not joking after you guys saw this engine Bay in one of my videos
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I got thousands of comments from you asking
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What’s the best way to clean your engine and I got so many requests from you guys that this became the most requested
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video ever so as usual. I’m going all out in this video
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I have a bunch of different vehicles with different engine based setups that are dirty in different ways
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Starting with the Driftstang which has a dirty engine that’s covered mostly in grease and oil
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So we’re going to go from this to this and with the Jag(Jaguar) we have the classic Daily driver dirty Engine Bay
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That’s just dirty from well driving it daily
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so here’s our before and then
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the after and then we have a truck with a dirty engine that’s covered in mud which was from driving through a
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puddle or two and
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this engine is going to go from this to this and
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Finally we have a van that’s over 20 years old with over
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300 thousand miles on her and not only is this engine bay dirty
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but we have a bunch of rusted parts that I’m going to show you how to clean up to make this engine look great and
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The best part is after watching this video
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You’re going to be able to super clean any engine and make it look brand new just like you saw using these common products
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We have some microfiber towels which you buy in bulk because we’re going to be using a lot different brushes
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paint markers cleaning wipes spray Wax Trim restore
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And Soapy wooder all these products are inexpensive
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And I’ll be sure to link them in the description below so you could easily find them so let’s begin
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The engine Bay Super clean process is real simple. Here’s the breakdown first
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We’re going to prepare the engine to get cleaned then we’re going to do a dry clean then a wet clean and then we’re going
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To dry the engine off and then detail it and don’t worry
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I’m going to explain each step as we go through it and to be sure I answer all the questions that you might have I
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even asked you guys on Instagram what you wanted to know about cleaning your engine
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So I’ll be answering all those questions and more in this video, so let’s get started
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The first step is the preparation step and although it seems simple
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It’s important to have all your cleaning supplies laid out
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Right next to your engine that’s going to make it a lot quicker to clean the engine and a lot more enjoyable because your products
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Are going to be right there for you to use it’s also a good idea to put on some gloves to protect your hands from
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Chemicals and oils and put on some safety glasses just in case some dirt splashes in your face now what you want to do next
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Since we’re getting the engine wet you want to isolate the power source
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Which is the battery by disconnecting it and if your batteries in the engine bay like this
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and it’s easy to get to
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Go ahead and 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
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Spaces, but no matter what even if you keep your battery in the car make sure you disconnect the positive and negative leads
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So we completely isolate the battery from the rest of the car and the whole point of disconnecting your battery is peace of mind
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Everybody’s big is concerned when you’re cleaning the engine bay getting water in something that you shouldn’t and then it shorts out
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But with the battery completely disconnected there’s no electric running through any of this, so you can’t short anything out
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There’s a lot less to worry about and then when we’re done cleaning and detailing the engine
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we can make sure everything is dry and then reconnect the battery and we’ll be good to go and
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finally the last thing for our preparation step even though we
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Disconnected the battery there are still some components that we don’t want to get wet sure you can get a little wet
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But you don’t want to get them soaking wet for example. We have the alternator we also have the distributor in this car
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We actually have two distributors, but what you want to do is you want to follow your spark plug wires
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And this is the electronic distributor if you want you can press down on the caps here
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Make sure that they’re forced all the way down that helps keep water out, but these are water sensitive following those spark plug wires
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We come over to the spark plugs and on this engine the spark plugs are at the top in most cases when the spark plugs
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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
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Doesn’t easily dry out, and you could have issues when we reconnect the battery so again these components can get splashed with water
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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
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Common is one that’s covered in plastic and usually these plastic covers are protecting whatever you don’t want to get wet
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So we just want to make sure we don’t get water behind the plastic and with that being said
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Everything under the hood is designed to get wet
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That’s why you could drive your car through puddles in the rain without worrying about anything
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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
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We’re not using a pressure washer and the reason why is these connections,sure they are water tight
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but over time with heat cycles with
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vibrations these become less and less
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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
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in small amounts will cause corrosion and then over time you’ll run into issues and
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One last thing we want to be careful of that you don’t really think about but you definitely don’t want to get water in is
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Your engine oil dipstick sometimes it’s popped up
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So you just want to make sure you push that all the way in so we don’t get water in the engine oil
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Same thing goes for your brake fluid reservoir. Make sure it’s completely tight and your power steering reservoir again
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Make sure it’s tight and finally if you have an automatic transmission
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and a dipstick make sure that dipstick is pushed all the way in and with that we are done with the
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Preparation steps, so let’s move on to the next step
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the next step is to dry clean the engine and that’s exactly how it sounds before we get the engine wet at All with the
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engine completely dry
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we’re going to clean it reason being is a lot of the dirt and Debris that gets on the engine is just
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dust and
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Road grind that
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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
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Dirt into places. We can’t easily reach. We’re going to clean it and to do that. It’s really simple
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We’re going to be using brushes
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First since there’s going to be a lot of dust get your dust masks on and it really doesn’t matter what brushes you use I?
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Like to use these brushes because they have a long handle so you could get into those hard-to-reach spaces, but we have a toothbrush
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We have regular painters brushes if that’s what you could find and then we have metal wire brushes
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And I’ll show you why we’re using that in a second
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So these brushes are being used to agitate all the surface dust but how do you remove that
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Well there’s a couple of ways and it depends what you have
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I personally like using a vacuum that way you could suck it up
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And we’ll also use this later to help dry the engine
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But if you don’t have a vacuum then you could use something like a leaf blower
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Or you could use one of these attachments on an air compressor to blow away all that dust and dirt
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So let me show you how this works
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We’re using a vacuum and a brush together although the dirt here is pretty loose already and could just be sucked up
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so where there isn’t li-like around the sensors or hard-to-reach places work that brush in there and
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Agitate the dirt so it becomes loose
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And then you have the vacuum right there to suck it up, and you might not think this is doing much
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But this is before the dryclean and this is after and that’s all from just using a dry brush
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So now you’re going to want to brush off as many
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Surfaces in the engine bay as you can this whole process is pretty quick, and it only takes about five minutes
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And it’s definitely helpful to have a few different sized brushes now brushes are great
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But it could be hard to reach into these tight spaces
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So an air nozzle like this that connects to an air compressor
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Works awesome they get even more dust out of the engine bay and look at all that dust getting blown out
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Another option is to use a leaf blower which also works well
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and with some vacuums all you have to do is clip the hose around and
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It will blow the air out instead of sucking it in
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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
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Wet now. I’m done with this engine. It’s completely dry creams, but one thing I want to mention
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We have this intake here. Which is metal. It’s aluminum, but it’s in pretty good shape
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It’s also a small part of the engine on some cars like in this Jaguar
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We have a large metal intake this is aluminum, and you can see there’s discoloration on it stains
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It’s pitted and corroded, and it doesn’t look good and since it’s such a big part of how this engine looks
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It’s important that we clean this and what we’re going to be using is a metal wire brush, and it’s pretty simple
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We just rub the metal wire brush back and forth and you could do this entire job with a metal wire brush
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But this is pretty big so if you have a rotary tool like this one with a metal wire
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Attachment will make cleaning this a lot
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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
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Sure that you’re careful around any plastic discs like centers or rubber hoses?
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And look at how much better that looked now once we clean the rest of the engine Bay
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It’s going to look even better. Want know what here you go?
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This is what it looks like what a nice and clean engine bay you can see that aluminum really sets it off
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It makes it look great, but you don’t necessarily need to clean this in every car for example
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I already super clean the engine in this Ford fiesta
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And I didn’t touch the aluminum at all and this still came out great
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And in this van the engine bay doesn’t have a lot of aluminum
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But what we do have is is aluminum right here for the lettering and I think if we polish this up it looked good against
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the black intake
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So it just takes a few seconds to run the wire wheel across this and clean it up real nice and for just a couple
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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
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Contrast is going to look awesome. And that is all for step two dry cleaning your engine a couple of brushes
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Dusting the engine off vacuuming it up and that gets us ready for the next step
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and
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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
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the Engine Bay
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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 and this is
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Actually a lot easier than everyone makes it out to be
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Now a common question is should you clean the engine when it’s warm or cold and the answer to that is you could clean it
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When it’s warm or cold if you’re going to clean a warm engine
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Just put your hand on top of it and make sure you could comfortably keep it there if it’s too hot let the engine cool
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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
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or crack engine parts
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But a warm engine is definitely better to clean on than a cold one because all that dirt grime and grease
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Comes off easier when it’s warmer just think about cleaning dishes
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You clean dishes with warm water not cold water, but you can’t clean an engine when it’s cold in this case
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I’ll be cleaning a cold engine
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So you’ll see how it comes out and let me show you what we’re going to using the cleaner again not too many materials
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We have our hose we have these cleaning wipes
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Soapy water a garbage bag some microfiber towels and an assortment of brushes and pipe cleaners the first thing we’re going to do is grab
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Our garbage bag because we’re going to be cleaning the top first
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We’re going to be working our way top down everybody forgets the hood
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But that’s a pretty important part
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So what you want to do is you want to cover the bulk of the engine you don’t want a lot of water getting on
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Top of the engine it’s okay to get off to the sides
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But you definitely don’t want to soak the top of the engine and this goes for any engine
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You’re cleaning whether in a truck an engine that already has a plastic cover or an engine
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That’s mostly covered by the wiper shroud you should always cover the engine to play it safe. So for the wet cream process first
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we’re going to clean the hood and then we’re going to clean the outside of the engine Bay and then we’re going to remove the
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garbage bag and clean the actual engine itself
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So let’s get back to the mustang and start cleaning the hood
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First you want to hose down the painted surfaces on the hood and that garbage bag is working great to keep that engine dry
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Since our hood liners dirty rinse that off as well
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But if your hood liner is sagging or looks delicate don’t get it wet because water is only going to make it work
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But this one’s in good shape to have no problem storing it down next grab a degreaser like Soapy water and spray down the hood
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Liner and painted surfaces now with a microfiber towel simply wipe down the painted surface and remove the dirt and grease it should come off
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Pretty easily if your hood liner is really dirty use some carpet cleaner and let it soak carpet Cleaner works great on Hood liners
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Finally rinse everything down with water and wash all the dirt away now. I can still see some stains over here
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I’m going to show you how to fix that in our last step but for now
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Let’s go clean the Engine Bay before
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Removing the bag we want to clean the entire
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Outside of the Engine bay so pick a side to start on I’m going to start here and work my way around
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First rinse down this part of the engine bay to remove all the surface dirt don’t use a high-pressure jet setting which could force water
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Into electrical Connectors next grab a cleaning wipe and wipe down the easy-to-reach surfaces the cleaning wipes not only absorb the dirt
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But it helps remove the oil and grease and you can tell this is getting clean because check out how dirty this wipe is now
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We want to rinse away all that dirt that we loosened up, and then grab your favorite degreaser in this case
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I’m using Soapy water
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Which is just a square root of dish soap and the rest filled with warm water
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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
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The metal or the rubber or plastic
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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
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The cleaner the finished products going to be so for any really tight spots you could grab your pipe cleaner and these work awesome for
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Getting into those spots you can’t normally get into and finally we just loosened up all that dirt
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Which is still sitting in that engine bed?
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So to remove it rinse it away with the hose now repeat this process for the rest of the engine Bay spray it down
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Wipe it down Rinse spray the Degreaser
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agitate with a brush
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And then rinse it all away each side should take about five minutes to thoroughly clean and it’s really not difficult to do
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And with everything around the engine bay cleaned up now
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we want to carefully remove that bag so you don’t get water all over the engine and
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The bag trick does a great job at keeping your engine dry and at this point?
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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
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So we have a lot of area to cover if you have a smaller 4-cylinder engine
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It’s a lot quicker
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But as you could tell we have a ton of hoses and wires and just a lot of little
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Crevices to get into to get this clean so that could get overwhelming real quick, but I have a bunch of tips and tricks
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I’m going to show you to make it so it’s not that bad and the first one is
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Split the engine down the middle and pick a side to start cleaning on so I’m going to start on the passenger side
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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
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To rinse down the engine so we need to have good access to clean the engine
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But you can see we have this intake in the way, and you can just work around it
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But it’s pretty big and it’s going to make it difficult to clean here
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so let’s remove it just disconnect the two sensors pop off a couple of hoses and
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remove the intake which gives us a lot more room and the edit benefit is that we could clean this out of the car and
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More importantly now
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We have a lot more access to the passenger side of the engine
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So I’m cleaning the actual engine first clean off any grease and oil with your cleaning wipes
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We have a pretty thick layer of grease here
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but it’s coming right off with the wipe and
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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
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Engine and the cold air around it and check out all that grease we removed
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Next spray down the area with soapy water and since we’re only using a fine mist
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We don’t have to worry about damaging anything
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So you could spray it everywhere then use a brush to agitate all the dirty
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Surfaces and for any surfaces that you can’t reach now’s when you can use those pipe cleaners and get into those really tight spaces
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Now if you don’t have a pipe cleaner to clean those hard-to-reach areas and the little tight surfaces
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I want to show you something to use that everybody has and that is a toothbrush
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so wet down the surface and the stiff Bristles do a good job at agitating that dirt and cleaning it out a
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Toothbrush also works really well on those tough to clean wiring harnesses now after loosening up all that dirt
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We need to somehow remove it and with all the other parts of the engine
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We just use the hose and rinsed it all away, but unfortunately we have a lot of electronics here
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We have those spark plug holes and just things we don’t want to get soaking wet. So instead of using the hose
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We’re going to be using a microfiber towel
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And we’re going to wipe everything
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down that
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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
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Same time and you can’t worry about getting the microfiber towel dirty that actually means that you’re wiping away the grease
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Here’s what a new microfiber
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Towel looks like here’s what the one that we’re drying with looks like so instead of all the grease being stuck on here
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It’s getting sucked up into our microfiber towel now some spaces like back in there are going to be really difficult to get into
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So a little trick grab your pipe cleaner
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And then grab your microfiber towel and wrap it in the pipe cleaner and now you can force your pipe cleaner back there and make
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It easier to get to those hard-to-reach
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spaces all
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right and with all that dirt and grease gun and cleaned up check that out that is looking so good, and we haven’t even
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Detailed it yet, so that’s just clean once we detail it. It’s going to look Brand-new
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So I’m just going to real quick clean this up
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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
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now after cleaning
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We’re left with a wet engine bay so grab a microfiber towel a nice clean one and start drying everything down
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This is actually a pretty important step you want the engine to be completely dry before
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We move to the next step which is
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Detailing and one thing you’ll notice as you’re drying your towel is going to start getting dirty
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so you’re also picking up that extra dirt that you might have left behind and
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as you’re drying you might see a spot like down there that I totally miss so just get in there with your towel if you
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need to grab some Soapy water and clean it up and
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Finally as you’re drying you might encounter a spot where you have puddled water just like here and also in here
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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
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Your towel in there, and absorb it or a little trick that works really well if you have a vacuum
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Just suck that water right out
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So dry the entire engine bay absorbing as much water as you can and there we go with our engine completely dried
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We are ready for our last step which is easily the most rewarding step
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and
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Our final step is a detailing step but before we detail the engine Bay don’t forget
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We have to detail the hood now washing this hood didn’t come out as clean as I wanted it to and one thing you could
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Do which looks awesome is pop off these clips and remove the hood liner since we already clean this and it’s completely dry
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I’m going to be using a black non flammable fabric
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Dye to restore the hood liner now
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Obviously, you don’t have to do this if your hood liner is not bad
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But this is going to make a huge difference for mine, and also they discontinued this for my car
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So you can’t even get a new one if you wanted and this is turning out nicely now as we let this dry
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Let’s detail the rest of the hood so grab your favorite spray wax and just spray all the painted surfaces
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We’re going to go all the way around
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After we’re done spraying grab a microfiber towel
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And we’re just going to buff in that spray wax right into that paint since we have our spray wax all ready now
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we could spray down all the painted surfaces in our engine Bay and
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then buff that wax into the paint and
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this is not only going to protect the paint but it’s going to make it a deeper red and
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Now that all our painted surfaces in the engine Bay are detailed
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It’s time to detail all the rubber and plastic surfaces and in order to do that
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We’re going to be using a water-based trim restorer this dries non greasy
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So it won’t collect dust it restores a deep black color in the rubbers and plastics and it actually
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Protects the rubber and plastic as well, and a mistake I see all the time, please don’t do this don’t use
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WD-40 don’t use motor oil don’t use any oily or greasy products in your engine Bay?
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Not only is it going to collect dust but it’s going to damage those plastics and rubbers so don’t use these so be sure to
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Use a trim restorer that’s safe on plastics and rubber and what I like to do I
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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
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your brush
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And we’re going to start on one side and work our way around
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so we’ll start back here and
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Start brushing it into the plastics and rubber as you spread the product in and there’s not enough just to have your brush into more
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And spread it around right now don’t worry about getting smooth coverage
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Just make sure everything you want covered is covered on
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Complex surfaces like the top of this distributor the brush is going to make it possible to get complete coverage
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Just spend some time and work it in there good
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And when you’re doing is you want to make sure that you don’t apply any product to the belt by mistake any product that gets?
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On the could cause the belt to squeak or even worse slip
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After you’re done applying the product early let it sit and soak for about 10 minutes
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After letting it sit for a few minutes grab your microfiber towel
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And now we’re going to buff off all the plastic pieces that we put trimmer store on the idea is we let the product Soak
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Into the pores of the plastic and rubber now
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We’re removing that top layer, so it doesn’t collect dust and so we could even it out
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So you basically want to rub down every surface you touch with the brush to keep track of that parts you buffed with the towels?
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I work on one side of the engine and then when I’m done I move to the other
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Now after buffing the entire engine bay this is looking amazing
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Check that out, and you could stop here
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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
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Is we want to look around the engine bay and just look for parts that look rusted or boats that just don’t look good for
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example
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There’s one right here a rusted bolt like this has ruined the look of your perfectly clean engine
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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
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Paint and I know that doesn’t seem like much
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But little details like that make all the difference and since we have the paint markers out
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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
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Bad this washer Fluid only cap is
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Faded so you can grab your paint marker and just color the raised letters only and look at that
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Attention to detail like that is going to really set your engine Bay apart from everybody else’s and with that man
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Just look at this engine. It’s so clean we are almost done
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We just need to put a couple of pieces in that we took out so let’s go do that
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Let’s add our cleaned intake and our cleaned battery and we can’t forget about our hood
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Insulation that looks so much better than before. Here’s the before and after look at that and
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Just to show you the car starts up with no problems. No check engine lights
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there you go and
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That is how you clean your engine bay now this takes about two hours total to do and it’s really simple
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Just take your time and have fun with it and you’ll get results
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Just like this this engine looks brand new not only does this look good
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But all the rubber and the plastic is
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Protected plus you have an engine bay you could be proud of and if you really wanted to it’s so clean you could eat off
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Of it as always all the products I used in this video are linked in the description
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So you could easily find them hopefully the video was helpful
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if it was remember to give it a thumbs up if you’re not a subscriber
21:42
consider hitting that subscribe button
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and
21:44
Finally if you go to super clean your engine be sure to take a before and after picture because I want to see it tag
21:50
Me in it send it to me on Instagram. Whatever you need to do
21:52
I’d love to check it out and if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments below
