Pine Sol Carb Cleaner - Before & After

I posted this in my build thread and I've seen some discussion on it in older posts, but I thought I'd just post my experience over here if people are interested.

So, to recap, I put 2 gallons of Pine-Sol in a five gallon pail along with my nasty carbs. I have found very little about pine-sol soaking around, a few posts on some other forums, and I was curious. Some others dilute the mixture with water, but I used full strength original formula Pine-Sol.

The pictures below are with NO scrubbing/carb cleaner or anything. Just disassembled them as much as I could in their condition, put them in a pail, waited two days. I didn't have any agitation or anything. Just had them in my house in a sealed container (caution: without a sealed pail, you will have an angry wife). There was no concern about the pail being sealed, no pressure build-up or anything strange. Just be careful when you open it up, the fumes are pretty nasty and made my throat a little raw for a bit.

Before & After:

It's hard to see with my crappy camera phone pictures, but the bowls are spotless. It will take very little cleaning and carb spray to get it to look better. I had problems with disassembly since these babies were so crusty. So, I'm thinking now that I can get in there, I may take them fully apart and soak overnight to get all the jets/passages freed up before I tear into it tomorrow with carb cleaner.

I'm going to save my pine-sol bucket and keep reusing it, can't see why it wouldn't work. There's some sludge in the bottom I might clean out, but I think it should be a good poor-man's parts cleaner.

One word of caution, I heard this didn't mess up plastic or rubber. The rubber seems fine and isn't even expanded like it does with carb cleaner, but I had some of the small parts in plastic cups and they did melt a bit. Not sure if that's because of my full strength mix or not, plus they were the thinnest, cheapest cups on the market. But I would not soak plastic parts in it after this experience. My ATC 110 has a plastic float, so if you're doing one like that, I'd just clean that separately.

Also, I didn't put the chrome caps in there, so I'm not sure if it would affect chrome at all. I'm thinking it would be fine, but who knows.

Sweet results! Did you use real Pine-Sol or store brand. I only ask because when I did mine, I used wal-mart brand (and diluted with water) and ended up with this white coating that required some scrubbing to remove. It's very possible that I did something wrong.

That's pretty amazing

Just used the real pine-sol, original formula. I thought if I was doing mad science, I might as well get the real stuff.

I also just finished up my carbs. I used Original Pine Sol and half hot water. Let them soak overnight and then rinsed them out the next day. Came out looking brand new althoguh mine werent nearly as bad as yours.

Holy shit man, thats insane! Ive always used carb cleaner and it destroys everything. This looks like a cheaper and much better solution.

I'm glad to see someone else doing this! I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago who works on old dirtbikes, and he swears by pine sol for carb baths. Only thing to watch out is don't put them in for a second bath because it will etch them. Not a bad thing if you don't mind the look. I'm eager to do this myself, but have only wstched him so far

Pine-Sol is what I've used on all my carbs. I mix it with very hot water, 1 part hot water to 4 parts Pine-Sol. The heat seems to help some. I normally remove all rubber and plastic bits "just in case." It's best if you can completely tear down the carb to just the carb body and soak the jets and other small parts apart from the carb body.

You MUST use genuine original Pine-Sol, no lemon fresh, no store brand. If you have a Costco membership, you can get huge jugs of it cheap, and you can indeed reuse it.

After I've soaked stuff for about 24ish hours, I wash the parts in very hot water and give it a little scrub with a toothbrush to get the remaining crud off. I then dry it off and use some WD40 to get the water out of the nooks and crannies. The WD40 also ensures that all the passageways in the carbs are clean.

It does stink though ;D

JSJamboree said:

Holy shit man, thats insane! Ive always used carb cleaner and it destroys everything. This looks like a cheaper and much better solution.

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I works pretty good Jordan. I did it with the junk 350 carbs. Sat out in the cold for a couple days and they were spotless. It didn't free up anything that would move such as the slide but it certainly cleaned all the outer gunk and didn't hurt the diaphragm. Bought a large jig of it at SAMs club.
Keith

I wish I had known about this before i did the lemon juice boil inside : talk about a STENCH holy hell its awful.
These days I just soda blast, but this is certainly a decent alternative

4:1
Posting for future referance

Did the Pine-Sol carb clean today. Soaked both carbs (fully submerged) for 2 hrs. Came out looking brand new.

Some people are using slow-cookers to keep the mixture hot for hours on end. Might try it with a hotplate on low.

I've also boiled my carbs in simple green. Works just as well. I think simple green is a little easier on the gaskets and other delicate components since it does not contain any petroleum products.

Pmbjngls22 said:

I've also boiled my carbs in simple green. Works just as well. I think simple green is a little easier on the gaskets and other delicate components since it does not contain any petroleum products.

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I've always removed everything that wasn't metal from the carbs before I soaked them, so I haven't had an issue with the Pine Sol. I love how well Simple Green works, but anytime I catch a whiff of it I start coughing and can't stop for ten or twenty minutes. Don't know what it is in it!

Tim said:

Some people are using slow-cookers to keep the mixture hot for hours on end. Might try it with a hotplate on low.

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Slow cookers are pretty darn cheap too - cheaper still at a garage sale!

After seeing the results with just room temperature soaking, I don't think heat is necessary, but I'd be interested to see if it speeds up the process at all. If anyone tries it, please post.

So I have my carb soaking in Pine Sol right now. Unfortunately, the available compressed air is at work. After I rinse with hot water and use the compressed air to dry it off, how much wd-40 do I need? Are we talking drenching it? I assume this is needed so it doesn't surface rust up before I can get it home, reassembled and installed on the bike? 4-5 hours after it's dried off before I can installed.

Most of the carbs are aluminum or some pot metal zinc alloy, so I mainly want to get any remaining pinesol cleared out of the passageways in the carb when I do it. I put on a pair of safety glasses (important!) and use the straw on the WD40 to blow out all the little tubes and passageways in the carb. Make sense?