Do any of you wash your engines?
I’ve got a ‘73 140, and during my annual recently my mechanic asked if I wanted to wash the engine before we put the lower and upper cowlings back on, and said using 100LL works great for this. I declined, I wanted to get the annual done and my engine is actually pretty clean, and it seemed like a really sketchy idea at first…I had visions of someone at the fuel pumps hosing down the front end of my plane…(why do our minds always go to the extreme unreasonable possibility first?). Anyway, as I thought about it it kind of makes sense…a rag dipped in 100ll would cut through any external oil, evaporates right away, I could wipe down all surfaces I imagine pretty quickly without causing any grief to electrics or alternator etc, so now on second thought seems like maybe a good idea.
But before I do it, anybody else do it this way, or have other advice on how to make engine glisten?
I’ve got a ‘73 140, and during my annual recently my mechanic asked if I wanted to wash the engine before we put the lower and upper cowlings back on, and said using 100LL works great for this. I declined, I wanted to get the annual done and my engine is actually pretty clean, and it seemed like a really sketchy idea at first…I had visions of someone at the fuel pumps hosing down the front end of my plane…(why do our minds always go to the extreme unreasonable possibility first?). Anyway, as I thought about it it kind of makes sense…a rag dipped in 100ll would cut through any external oil, evaporates right away, I could wipe down all surfaces I imagine pretty quickly without causing any grief to electrics or alternator etc, so now on second thought seems like maybe a good idea.
But before I do it, anybody else do it this way, or have other advice on how to make engine glisten?
