Oddball Update

After how rudely I was treated by my Trans Am the other day, this might come as a surprise. But I spent three hours cleaning and detailing its engine bay today, after replacing the battery and making sure the newfound electrical problems seemed to have been solved. The engine bay had not been cleaned with any significance since the car was delivered more than seven years ago, so as you can imagine it was a dirt heap. I knew cleaning off that many years’ worth of dirt and grime was going to be an undertaking, but I also knew I couldn’t expect a prospective buyer to pay good money for the car otherwise. So I bought some Gunk™ citrus-based engine cleaner and went at it.

A few hours later, and the LS1 engine looks almost showroom-new again. There’s still some fading of plastic, a few spots of really baked-on grime in hard to see (and even harder to reach) areas, but overall it’s worlds better, and I’m very pleased with the outcome. The process was a lot simpler than I thought it would be; part of why I’d never cleaned under the hood before was because I was afraid I’d mess up some sensitive electronic componentry or cause a short. (Heh, the irony is, the car was perfectly adept at fabricating similar problems all by itself.) All I did was cover up the battery, intake, fuse boxes and a few other electronic bits with plastic bags, then spray the engine cleaner on the rest. I took a brush to the worst parts, then let it soak for about 15 minutes. After that I rinsed it with a low-pressure mist from the hose, scrubbed it with sponges and old shop rags, and then detailed the plastic parts with Armor-All. I even took some polish to the metal clips that hold on the air box lid. Perfect!

Couple that with the new battery, and some vacuuming of the interior (and the leaves which were stuck in the cowl), and the car looks great — in fact, the engine is now cleaner than the exterior, which hasn’t had a bath in a little while. It rained almost all day today, so the car didn’t get washed. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll get some sun.

As an aside, there was a GTO order tracker update today, but my new car didn’t happen to get sequenced early, so it’s still on target for a build week of 10/17. The update showed me that the first batch of ’06s are on the boat en route to the U.S., so it should be another month or two before we start seeing them on dealer lots!

Categorized as Cars, Cars/GarageBlog