How to Wire Tuck your Engine Bay and Clean the Grime

Engine Bay Clean up and Wire Tuck

With any car that's been on the road a decade or two, there's bound to be an abundance of dirt and grime in the engine bay, one of the cheapest things you can do to improve the look and condition of the car is to tidy up the engine bay. There are varying degrees of engine bay clean-up, at the basic end you can use a degreaser and a rag to clean as much as possible. I opted for a more extreme clean, since I had the engine out of the car, this allowed me to do much more.

There is an awful lot of stuff in the engine compartment, that really doesn't need to be there, so to start things off I relocated the battery to the trunk. A full procedure for that can be found here in this technical article: Battery Relocation

The next thing to go and be moved to the trunk was the windshield washer fluid reservoir bottle. At the same time you can reroute the wiring harness to be hidden near the front rad support using tie-wraps. The exact procedure for the washer bottle is outlined in the tech article: Washer bottle relocation.
Now, with those two bits moved into the trunk, there's a number of things that can be tossed in the bin, if you like. Starting with the charcoal canister, the complete guide for removal can be found here: Charcoal canister removal.

HICAS solenoids and lines

HICAS removed

Then you can move onto one of the bigger pains, and thats the HICAS system. If you've locked out the rear steering rack, you can remove all of the hydraulic lines and solenoids from the engine bay for this system. The complete walk through for this is outlined here: HICAS delete.

Green cleaned passenger side

With the wires tucked away, and all the useless stuff tossed in the bin, by now your engine bay should be pretty empty, but still quite filthy. 

The very best engine cleaner I managed to find was the Simple Green spray, it doesn't damage the paint, but it makes the grease and grime fall off as if it never wanted to be there in the first place.

Green clean drivers' side

Some people insist on removing the fuse panel as well, but I considered an opportunity to do something different and ordered a stainless steel etched "GTR" fuse box cover from the GTR Owners Club based in the UK, they manufacture these pieces for a very reasonable price.

If you're going to be using an after-market boost controller, you can also plug the OEM boost solenoids' vacuum lines, and toss that in the bin as well.

You can also relocate the resistor pack for the fuel injectors to a place where it won't be seen if you like, and continue to tuck as much of the wiring away as you feel necessary, some of the wiring near the fuse box can really be cleaned up well. At the very least, re-wrapping the wiring with fresh electrical tape will help to tidy up the overall condition. I re-taped everything I could, including the ignition harness.

The last thing I did was to replace the coolant overflow tank with an alloy tank.

For now, the result is significantly cleaner than it was before all of this began, but there is still more that I will be doing here over the 2011 months.