Hey y’all, I made a post on here a little while ago about a ticking noise from my engine. Long story short I’m pretty sure it’s a lifter. So I recently bought a BFD cam from Texas speed. Along with lifters, push rods, rocker bushings, oil pump, and a timing set. I’ve read a lot of forms before starting this job so I have a pretty good idea of what I’m getting myself into. However, I still had a couple unanswered questions.

1. Even though I cleaned around the cylinder head before removing it, some small debris still got into the cylinders and lifter trays. I’m not too worried about the debris in the lifter trays because I’m replacing all that stuff. My question is, how would I clean small debris that has fallen in between the piston and the cylinder wall?
2. I have also seen a lot of threads about cleaning carbon off of pistons. Some people say definitely do it others say if it’s not causing a problem then leave it. I will include a picture of my pistons for reference on how much carbon there is
3. I am only going to be working on this project on the weekends so I’m trying to plug everything up during the week. Right now, I have all of the lifter bores covered with tape and the cylinders have a towel in them to help dry up moisture. Is there a better way of covering up this motor?

thank you in advance for the help!

How I have the motor covered right now

Carbon on piston and debris in cylinder

 

Shop vac around the pistons. And you should probably wipe the cylinders with oil of some sort to avoid rust.

Some stuff will make its way down the oil galleries, so once all back together, you can drop the oil, put new stuff in, then do like 500 miles and swap it again new filters each time.
I didn't bother with carbon scraping, you are just going to cause more problems with debris.

Im going to send an oil sample out soon for testing to QA my attempt at similar work. (New heads, lifters, intake etc)

 

I'd use an oily cloth to coat and clean out any debris. Maybe even manually rotate to push anything else up into the oil coating and wipe again.

 

I agree, vacuum what you can, rotate to push it up, last resort hit with compressed air and vacuum simultaneously.

 

Thank you everybody for the help! I took your advice and put some oily rags in the cylinders.
As for cleaning the debris out of the lifter bores I have created a patent pending special tool😂. It’s a shot vac handle with a Bendy straw and tape around it to suck out all the small stuff.

In case anyone’s interested, the noise I was hearing was coming from a broken lifter tray. also, while removing the balancer turns out some smooth brain individual pinned at an angle and cracked the balancer. I was going to bite the bullet and buy an ATI balancer however that seems like a lot of money for a cam only build.


Tool I use for cleaning debris

Cracked lifter tray

Cracked balancer
If anybody has any good balancer recommendations, it would be helpful.

 

There are several recommendations on the Forum for Powerbond as a less expensive alternative to ATI.