Plastic Media Blasting of Engine

MDZ1rider - That is beautiful! Ed

Thanks. There's some guy on here with a 650 that set a high standard for me to shoot for. Not to hijack Grobbie's thread, but here are some "as found" pictures of the engine, Another member found the bike started the disassembly. He decided to move on to a different project. I brought it home in boxes.

WOW! That is an amazing transformation! Those before & after pics should inspire anyone who ever considered rescuing a bike. That really is a great save! Ed

Grobbies wrote: Not sure if this should be in the "Paint" section, but it is definitely relevant to the engine.

I spent approximately 30 hours getting close to my GPz's engine. Still a lot of dirt and paint left to try and get off. The motor was running perfectly before getting the bike apart, so I don't want to strip the entire engine down just because I wanted to re paint it (call me lazy?). My dad who works in the aeronautics industry said he can have the completely assembled engine blasted with plastic media, since they use plastic media to clean their more "sensitive" aircraft components. My view is that if I do use plastic media to blast clean/strip the paint and dirt of the motor, any plastic that might find its way into the engine will not be that big of an issue. If I spend enough time by making sure all holes etc. into the engine is properly sealed off, then surely this should work?

Any opinions on whether I should go ahead with this? Or any opinions and/or guidance from someone that has used plastic media to do blasting before?

Thanks

I tried out some plastic media about 7 years ago. I found glass bead works better. Granted, I didn't try different variations of plastic, only one.

When I say glass bead, I mean real bead, not the crushed glass you find in places like Tractor Supply. 30-50 & 50-80 work really well for me.

Where do you get the glass bead?
Steve

I'm lucky enough to have this Business close to my old neighbor hood. Been dealing with them for over 30 years.
Metal Preparations. www.metalpreparations.com/ .
This is mostly a Business site. They ship Truckloads all over the Country. Site has a lot of facts. No pricing.
I walk in for cash sales. Last bag of their finest size glass beads 25 pounds cost me $34. I get about a year out of a bag. Don't waste $ at Harbor Freight.

MDZ1, no need to worry about hijacking. We have enough of it happening here in South Africa, so pretty used to it by now hahaha. I honestly don't mind looking at photos of other guy's builds. It honestly encourages me to do better than what I thought I was going to do.

Just a little caution for you guys media blasting a cylinder head. It's strongly advised to plug all the various openings to the internal oil galley passages. Kawasaki gun drills the passages and then seals them with metal plugs pressed into the head. If you glass bead blast the head without closing off the passages the grit will get down into these blind passages where it's very difficult to clean out. Using soda is safer than glass for this reason.

The head below was soda blasted. Plugged the openings before and tried to not blast directly on the susceptible areas. Scrubbed it down with plastic brushes and hot water afterwards to make sure any remaining grit was dissolved.

Nessism wrote: Just a little caution for you guys media blasting a cylinder head. It's strongly advised to plug all the various openings to the internal oil galley passages. Kawasaki gun drills the passages and then seals them with metal plugs pressed into the head. If you glass bead blast the head without closing off the passages the grit will get down into these blind passages where it's very difficult to clean out. Using soda is safer than glass for this reason.

The head below was soda blasted. Plugged the openings before and tried to not blast directly on the susceptible areas. Scrubbed it down with plastic brushes and hot water afterwards to make sure any remaining grit was dissolved.

There's not an oil passage on a 900/1000 motor anywhere that can't be easily and fully flushed out. The only possible problems you could run into are:

a - not flushing them properly
b - using media of a size that could actually get lodged in a passage

The factory service manual shows the oil passages and flow. The rest is common sense and proper flushing techniques....

The 750/4 engines oil passages are NOT easy to flush. You can flow water/solvent through them, but there is no way to run a brush or what have you through the passages to assure there is no trapped media.

I have just this problem on an 1100 head, it was sand blasted and I need to drill out and tap the oil galleys, to allow for better cleaning.

LarryC wrote:
The factory service manual shows the oil passages and flow. The rest is common sense and proper flushing techniques....

What do you mean by proper flushing techniques?