Steam cleaning Reatta's engine

[Finfan1]

I took my Reatta to a car show last Sunday (first time). The engine compartment is clean but not perfect. I was wondering if anyone has had problems degreasing or steam cleaning these engines.

I guess I'm looking for do's and don'ts

[Guest Dan Gibbs]

Great question Fin

My '89 has over 160k on it and is definitely grungy under the hood. I want to get the grease and dirt off to "clean the canvas" and detail under there.

Here's a youtube video that I watched last weekend of a car detailer cleaning a '72 Buick Centurion engine bay. My '89 looks this bad but yours probably doesn't.

I watched another video months back about a guy whose business drives around and steam cleans collector cars but I can't remember any quick details to find the exact video. I did a quick search on youtube using the terms "under hood steam cleaning" and there are quite a few results. The cool thing that I can remember about the video was that it didn't blast the heck out of everything with high pressure water, but used low velocity steam and the results were amazing. It was gentle enough that the guy uses it on interior grunge also.

HAH!!! I remembered it!!! It's a video from Jay Leno's Garage on youtube...very cool. This is more like what you're looking for to clean/detail your bay:

If it's good enough for Jay, it's good enough for the rest of us :-D

Dan Gibbs

[Pensive Scribe]

I just went ahead and did it. Pre-soaked with straight Superclean then car wash bay pressure wand clean. It came out good, but ran a little rough until the engine heat evaporated any residual water from coils and such.

Maybe I got lucky.