Short of a razorblade, what do you guys suggest to get rid of old gasket material on the block/head surfaces, and also the carbon from cylinder walls and piston tops? I don't want to take pistons out.

There is a spray-on gasket remover that works okay, but it's slow and you still have to do some scraping.

I use a piece of hard plastic to scrape carbon from an engine I don't want to disassemble. Make sure you cover any place you don't want carbon chips to get into and keep a vacuum cleaner handy.

A "Scotchbrite" wheel on a drill motor can be a time saver but be careful where you "aim" the wheel, it will throw some fibers around.
Vacuum and wipe-up the mess when you get finished "buffing".
DD

I always find the gasket remover made by permanex works good. You just spray it on and wait for about 10 minutes then scrap off what's left of the gasket.

Eastwood Co and a few other companies like Snap-on sell a plastic bristle attachment to fit on the end of a drill or air tool. It works quite rapidly for removing stuborn gasket material. As Doc said, you still will need to be concerned with flying debris.

http://products3.3m.com/catalog/us/en00 ... us_aad_3_0

I use a sterling silver cake spatula, Just don't tell the wife! Soft enough not to mar the surface you are working with. Works espically well when removing carbon build up on pistons and on gaskets which have been soaked in remover.

Thanks for the input, all.
Doc, will a scotch brite pad be gentle enough for cylinder walls and piston tops?

I have found small metal putty knifes to work well. Don't know about the more common plastic ones, though.

The quickest is the plastic bristle disc on my 1/4" die grinder, sometimes the scotchbrite comes out. If it has to be done by hand, I use the gasket remover in a spray can along with a gasket scraper, putty knife, and some other tools.

I wouldn't recommend using the scotch brite in a cylinder bore. Using chevron gas, and/or a techroline additive on a regular basis helps keep things clean. Also, once your engine is up and running, once a year you can get the engine up to running temp, have a friend run it at high rpm, then spray a mist of water over the carb, the resultant steam during combustion should scrub any carbon loose. Don't dump a cup of water in there, just use a spray bottle. That's my 2 cents.

-D.Idiot

Yep those plastic bristles in that link budbandy posted work out quite nicely. My main concern was the carbon on the pistons/cylinder bore. If I were to use scotchbrite pads on the bore I would use the ones by hand, say soaked in brake cleaner, not on a drill.

I use chevron and only chevron gas. The fuel injection system I am putting on there now is running way way rich, which is probably where all that carbon came from.

When I had the head off my engine, I sprayed the piston tops with WD40. This loosened a lot of the carbon. I then used compressed air to blow it off. What remained was a thin, hard baked layer of carbon. This process deposited a lot of small carbon particles in the top ring land, above the first ring. I carefully blew this out as well. Unless you can do this with compressed air, this will be very hard on the rings and bores when you first start the engine.

Mitch

A razor blade worked fairly well on the piston tops. I do plan to charge the compressor up and blow out all the crevices I can find to get rid of any (or at least the most I can) particles that stuck around.