Engine restoration is a dirty job. We all wore gloves to keep our hands clean whenever possible (sometimes it was just much easier to do it bare hands), but by the end of the long Memorial Day weekend, we were dirty. I was finding grease spots on me for at least 2 days afterwards and our work clothes were completely covered in grease/oil/etc that covered and were still inside the engine. We had not drained the oil completely and oil would come out through other holes other than the oil drain plug, and we forgotten to drain the antifreeze from the engine so that left a big mess when we tilted the engine on the side to get a better angle on things. The water pump turned into a coolant fountain. All were cleaned up with sawdust and swept away...messy messy.
Engine block cleaning itself required more of the same wire brush/kerosene/hose down/air spray cleaning technique that was used on the engine head. Before hosing down, we covered the top with plastic and tied it down to keep any debris from getting inside the block. We should have tied down the plastic more securely in hindsight as the pressure from the air spray blew some water underneath the plastic.
A cleaned engine block... We plan to spray paint it later to make it really stand out after all the effort we have put into restoring it, but that will be on the next visit back to New York.
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