We have use swimming pool "Muriatic Acid" many time for doing this. This is
30% hyrochloric acid. It is very strong and if you get is on your skin it
will burn you badly.
Using gloves and a face shield, what we do is to seal up the thermostat
housing and any other openings to the water jackets that are not through the
head gasket so that with the cylinder head turned gasket side up, the water
passages can be filled completely with the acid. We leave the head outside
int the sun where it is kept warm for a couple of hours or so occassionally
rocking the head back and forth to get the acid to move around a little.
Then carefully lift on end of the head to dump out the acid. We dilute the
runoff with lots of water to make it safe. Then rinse out the head with
LOTS of water and inspect the water passages for debris. Repeat as needed
until the water ways are clean. We have also used the same process to to
clean out block water passages. T series MGs are very bad for getting
plugged up. Only use this acid on cast iron. It will eat aluminum big
time!
Regards, Greg Solow
----- Original Message -----
From: <Gt6steve@AOL.COM>
To: <Vintage-race@autox.team.net>; <FOT@autox.team.net>
Sent: Saturday, October 23, 1999 1:46 PM
Subject: Water jackets
> Greetings all, Does anyone have experience or opinions on acid washing
> cylinder head water jackets to remove accumulated rust. I recently
sectioned
> a cracked Triumph head to study the internals and was pretty amazed at the
> crap inside it. I've thought of fabricating manifolds and pumping some
> caustic through or simply immersing an entire head in something to try to
> eliminate these sediments. Any thoughts? TIA, Steve
>
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