smittysrepair
Well-Known Member
I am looking for everyones thoughts and or suggestions on a chemical to use for soaking engine parts, engine blocks, and other various parts in. What I am thinking about doing is building me a soak tank for the various engines, transmissions, and other components that I service. I have been using the carburetor soak buckets for several years now on smaller stuff but it has gotten pathetic on how well it works in the past few years. I can remember when you could put a nasty or painted Holley carburetor in the stuff and after a night of soaking it would come out looking like a new one with everything removed from it even the paint. Now days even with a fresh bucket of the same stuff you will be lucky if the grease is gone. On a lot of stuff I also use an air agitator system I built years ago in the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket of mineral spirits to clean bolts and other not very nasty items and it works great on the easy stuff. But what I am really wanting to clean is the real nasty, rusty, carbon coated, and painted stuff. I know there is several labor intensive options out there but that is what I want to avoid by doing this especially seeing time is money and any money I can save a customer makes them happy. I do know there will be a cost involved in the setup and purchase of the chemicals. But I am willing to bet that most customers would rather pay a reasonable cleaning charge instead of several hundred dollars in labor for cleaning parts if they get the same or better results. So to sum it up I am looking for some stuff that is so mean the state of California banned even the mention of its name over 100 years ago because it is just that danged mean. lol