It could be put off no longer, it was time to dig into the engine. I am using the factory service manual to disassemble the engine in the best order. First up comes the heads and cylinders which are the last remaining engine components that need painting, the main case is supposed to be bare aluminum. The state of the head and cylinders was rather poor, most of the paint was gone and there were old mud wasp nests between half of the cooling fins.
The first step was scrubbing 30 years of dirt and wasp nest off of everything. I washed them with warm water and a stiff brush, which cleaned up everything and then took heavy cleaner/degreaser and q-tips and cleaned all of the dirt and oil out of all of the small crevices in the cooling fins. Once that was done I used the soda blaster to strip the remaining paint and oxidation and went through the same hand cleaning process again to make sure everything was clean. I then carefully masked off all of the opening and hit everything with 3 coats of high temperature engine paint. Now as you can see below the edges of all of the fins are bare metal and semi polished, this proved to be a bit of a headache as there is no good way to mask that edge as the edge is no longer square. I ended up painting it and the scraping and using a scotch pad to polish the edges. Now scotch pads release small particles of aluminum abrasive, small enough to hide in engines and large enough to ruin bearings, so I had to make sure the masking was still good and wash everything a third time to get rid of the sanding dust, but they turned out pretty good in the end.
Next up is Clutch and engine gear disassembly and inspection.
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