Scraping away the crud (frame-off resto people can skip this post!)

Posted by Jay Faubion On 2008/5/9 11:24:10

When I got my Packard a couple of years ago, one of the first things I noticed was the huge amount of crud that coated almost everything underneath the car.

It seemed like everything from the radiator back to the driveshaft had from 1/4" to 1/2" of thick, stiff (but not entirely dry) crud on it. You couldn't even tell what some of the parts looked like originally.

When I was a teenager a century or two ago I remember being in a service station where they had a steam cleaner for taking stuff like that off. I've not been able to find anything like that myself, and so I've just made a practice of taking a paint scraper under the car with me everytime I do any other work and scraping away at whatever's near me. It's getting better and better but it occurs to me that there MUST be a better way to do this. I don't have a lift available to me so I can stand under it with a pressure washer.

What do you all do to clean the underbody? Any great ideas?

Jay