Soda blast P&C?
 

Good evening brain trust!

I am well into my first tear down of a stock 3.0 from an 83 SC. The pistons and cylinders look great except for some carbon in the ring lands and a bit on the top edges of the cylinders.

The heads cleaned up so well with soda blasting that I want to do the same to the P&Cs but I wanted to check with the experts first in case this is not a good idea for the cylinder walls or piston skirts.

Thanks for your valued input!

Steve

I use low pressure (60 PSI) soda blasting to clean all my pistons and the external surfaces of all my cylinders.

Scotchbrite is the best cleaning/de-galzing system for the cylinder bores.

soda won't hurt anything.

--->Make that WHITE Scotchbrite.

You can safely clean & de-carbonize the pistons and cylinders, however I'd be VERY careful to not blast the bores with soda as that will damage the Nikasil.

Steve - my home brew soda blasting was so gentle that I could (and often did) blast my fingers without embedding any soda in or otherwise harming my flesh.

At that low impact range, is this really going to damage Nikasil? Not that I'd expect to blast the insides of a cylinder, because they don't need it anyway. Is a proper soda blaster of much higher impact velocities?

Walt,

The sharp edges of the commercial media can damage the bores with sufficient pressure. Our soda cleaner does an excellent job of removing carbon, dirt, rust and even powder paint so I know it can etch a Nikasil bore.

I'd experiment with a piece of aluminum and inspect it under close magnification to be sure.

Does anyone have a recommendation on mesh size for the soda needed when cleaning up cylinder heads? (mesh size would be on the bag)

Thanks

Mesh size? Commercial soda media? I got mine in bags from Costco. For baking and whatnot.

Perhaps this is not aggressive enough for carbon. Did a great job of cleaning gunk off of an aluminum tranny case, though, getting into the nooks and crannies.

Made a mess of my driveway.

Next time I start making this mess I will dig into my box of junk parts. I've got some pieces of exploded Nikasil cylinder that would be ideal for such a test. Of course, my spouse has trouble understanding why I hang onto some broken parts.

nikasil
 

does that also mean a ball-hone is verboten on nikasil?