Some New Year Cleaning... Part 3

After the New Year celebrations I found myself on the holiday, Monday January 4th without anything to do.  The weather was nice, and even though I was relatively satisfied with how clean I had gotten the car, I decided to fool around a bit... famous last thoughts because I ended up working on the car until it got dark!

Anyway, first order of business was, I was wondering about what lay under all that plastic under the hood.  Turns out Lexus uses some very clever plastic clips which, if pushed down past the initial indent, allow for easy removal.  Once I began taking all the clips off, and began peeling off the plastic covers, I discovered this:

See all that dirt that had been trapped underneath the cover...

And you can see all that dust and dirt on the front strut area too! Amazing...

Dust and dirt on the plastic boxes and the front strut area on this side too

You can see the dirt on the bottom side of the cover as well

So of course, these pieces had to be washed with some Simple Green and cleaned up

You can see all the visible dirt all over... what to do?

Liberal application of Simple Green, being careful not to spray into what appear to be electrical items, and using a soft brush to make sure that all surfaces are cleaned. 

We ended up with all the rubber and plastic items cleaned up:

(Most) Everything is clean. 

Tower bar area...nice and clean (and yes, I applied Zaino AIO there too)

It goes without saying that I applied Zaino AIO to all painted surfaces under the hood. Then, it was just a matter of applying some engine protectant/detailer.

This stuff is good, but must be applied sparingly...

With the center cover back on... I actually like the way this looks, except for the half painted front frame.
Would look so good if it was all steel under the hood was painted to the same level as the rest of the body.
Yellow arrows point to the painted areas that got cleaned up and to which I applied ZAINO.

Meanwhile, while I was waiting for the plastic cover pieces, as well as the detailing spray to dry, I realized one minor detail I had yet to tackle:

Those exhaust outlets need some TLC!

So simply washing the car didn't remove this burnt on stuff...

The chrome polish easily took the crud off the top one...

So while the chrome polish made short work of the top exhaust outlet, the crud on the bottom one did not come off no matter how much I tried. So...

Time to use some mechanical help...

Now nice and shiny!!

I repeated on the other side, and then used some Black on Black spray instant black spray to bring the black back to the inside of the exhaust tips (after cleaning them out of course)

Look like real exhaust pipes? LOL. Who knows how long they will stay that way...

Put everything back together, and applied some more Aerospace Protectant

Done! Clean enough to eat off of!

Truth be told, there was one additional NON-cleaning item I took care of that day, which I will cover in my next post. Stay tuned!