Introduction
If you own a car, there are many thrilling moments and sweet memories with your family, friends or loved ones evolving the car. But apart from these sweet parts, there are a number of side effects of owning a car.
And one of them is to clean and maintain the car parts on regular. But with that, we don’t mean cleaning the seat and carpet only. There are a number of parts in both the interior and exterior of the car. And you have to be a caregiver to all of them.
In today’s post, we will talk about cleaning one of such delicate part of the engine- the piston head. This is an essential part of the cylinder heads, and the process involves a number of steps.
Take a couple of minutes of break from whatever you are doing, and go through the whole post. We have broken down every detail down there-
Why Cleaning Piston Heads Is Important?
As many of us know, pistons play the great role of converting the thermal energy into mechanical energy that drives the car. Therefore, if there is any worn out or dirty part in any segment of the piston, that will definitely drive into severe problems like engine failure, lack in mileage and so on.
To it’s better to check the car engine and take essential actions. In general sense, the engine piston and piston head get dirty after every couple of regular uses. In case you are not that much of a regular user, this timespan might vary a lot.
But the summary line is, cleaning the piston and piston head is quite important, and you have to be aware of the cleaning frequency as well.
Go through the next segment, where we will be talking about the essential items and the steps on how to clean piston heads. Stay tuned-
Steps on How to Clean Piston Heads
Items You Need
To clean the cylinder head and the piston heads as well, there would be a number of essential items needed. Have a look at the list-
- Canned air or pressurized air from an air compressor.
- Parts of brake parts cleaner.
- A couple of buckets or tubs.
- Rags or paper towels.
- Scraper made of plastic.
Done with collecting all the items into hands, here we go with the steps and processes-
Step 1:
At first place, completely disassemble the car engine piston head. For that, you need to make sure that the cylinder head is completely taken off. Because the cylinder head is the part where all of the piston heads are located.
There are camshafts in cylinder heads, which should be taken off with special care. In case you have not done it before, take help from an expert instead.
Step 2:
Afterward, cover yourself up with safety gears Because the process of cleaning piston heads will involve chemical agents, which can be dangerous to use with bare hands.
Make sure you have got gloves for your hands, and safety goggles for your eyes. While choosing the gloves, make sure that it’s resistive against chemical agents.
Step 3:
At this step, make sure that you know the exact material that the piston heads are made of. Because the cleaning process of the piston head varies a lot based on what kind of material it has got.
For usual cases, the piston head material is aluminum alloy or cast iron. So we will assume that you have one of these two, and continue through the rest of the process.
Step 4:
At this step, we have to remove the head gasket material. For that, we will need a plastic scraper. The head gasket is responsible for creating a seal between the engine block and the piston head.
Look for head gasket materials at every area possible, and scrap the material with the plastic paper. While doing the task, make sure that you don’t hurt the mating surface.
Also, make sure that you don’t use any metal scraper in this process. Cause this will hurt the piston head itself.
Step 5:
Make a solution of the chemical cleaner and fresh water into a tub. For every cleaning agent, there will be specific instruction about how and what ratio to use while making this solution.
Make sure that the tub is ½ full of the solution. And also make sure that the head unit sits well within the tub.
However, be careful while you’re moving the cylinder head unit. Because there are delicate parts that might get damaged.
Step 6:
Take a parts cleaner at this step, and take out the head unit from the tub. The oil and grease buildups should be loosened up by now.
Now, take the parts cleaner and rag the cleaning agent of your choice. And apply the parts cleaner with a semi-soft cloth onto hard to reach places. There would be carbon buildup that is needed to take out in this process.
Once done, proceed to the next step.
Step 6:
At this stage, the carbon buildups of the head unit should be loosened up. Now take that unit into the same tub, but this time the tub should be full of water.
Instead of hot water, it would be good if you can manage to use warm water. This will take out the oil agents completely.
Step 6:
If you can still find some more carbon buildup dirt into nooks and corners of the head unit, you can continue with the previous three steps once again.
A repetition will bring on more accuracy to the process.
Bottom Line
To learn how to piston heads, it doesn’t need to doctorate on automobiles. All you need to do is know what items do you need, and how to conduct the process. Hope this guide helped you out in this regard.