[Lear35A]

Andy's post on cleaning things up with his engine out compelled me to confess. I too faced this. Besides grease and grime Porsche made life difficult by coating a lot of stuff on the bottom with this brownish stuff. I assume this was for corrosion protection (I had a '67 911 that rusted into oblivion, so I know why Porsche got paranoid about this). However, it's ugly and a lot of the aluminum castings on our cars really are works of art.

So, I had to get this stuff off. And I used Jet A, which is basically kerosene. (OK, confession over.) To this I added a brass wire brush, ScotchBrite pads and tremendous amounts of elbow grease, It is petroleum based, but after all you're washing off petroleum based goo. I have a big tub with a few inches of the JetA in it and go after one piece at a time, so all the crude stays in my tub. Eventually all this can be disposed of in oil recycling centers. So environmentally I don't think it's too bad.

With my engine out AGAIN, I have time AGAIN, so I'm attacking the suspension. Today I started on the cross member and A-arms. A before and after picture of the A-arms shows what you can do.

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[Darryl]

That yellowish, brownish goo is called cosmoline and yes it is a corrosion inhibitor. Excellent work by the way...very pretty!

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[greg968CAB]

You have the engine out again????? Must backtrack and see why you are making the various bits way nicer than they were originally shipped. And yes cosmoline lasts for decades. It even withstood 403,000 miles on the rear torsion tube access covers on my Karmann Ghia. It is super glues sticky cousin.

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[kwikt]

Lance, what are the part numbers on those arms.

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[rxter]

So this cosmoline stuff stays on for 17-years and 100K+ miles? It seems to be working pretty well.

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[tamathumper]

They should just make the whole car out of that stuff...

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