Help - Cosmoline? has gone milky!

[cdodkin]

Figure someone may have the answer to this one



Hit the engine bay of an 80's M6 with a cleaner degreaser (Purple Power) which proceeded to turn all of the previously unseen cosmoline? coating everything, a nasty shade of white/beige!



Looks like everything was coated with this waxy substance, but was not obvious as it was uncolored.



Now it looks like cr@p - white on black hoses, and a brown color on the textured finish of the previously black powder coated block.



I'm at a loss as to how to proceed - this stuff is everywhere, and seems to be resistant to many cleaning substances.



I don't want to make it worse - in fact, I want to get it back to how it looked before.



Any suggestions as to suitable products, techniques etc much appreciated.



Chris.

 

[Accumulator]

Yeah, that can happen. The stuff you used has compromised the cosmoline; it's not really cosmoline, people just call it that. It's really just a paraffin-based rustproofing and you messed up the paraffin. Been there, experienced that. I most recently dealt with this on my '97 M3, and I bet you're dealing with the same stuff.



To get it looking better again, you have a few options, but they're just variations on the same theme: remove the compromised product. NO matter what you decide to do, it's gonna be a bit labor-intensive and you won't get it back to the exact same condition (at least I never have).



I'd use a steamer to soften it and then wipe off the softened "excess" with a rag/sponge. Usually, the whitened/crappy-looking stuff will come off and leave some OK stuff behind but it takes a knack that IME can only be developed through experience. I did the M3 that way because I didn't want it to look "stripped of undercoating". You might end up taking off >90% of it by the time you get all the whitened stuff off though, depends how much you compromised it.



You might also try a *diluted* mix of your degreaser to help things along, but I had far better results with the steamer and if you use the degreaser you need to have water handy to rinse it right away. The idea is to just *barely* melt the stuf and wipe it before it dries again.



Warning, IME you'll find spots that simply won't look right. I clean them all the way (see below) and then touch them up with Wurth brand Body Protection, which closely approximates the stuff BMW (and other Euro makers) uses.



On the hoses, IMO it's best to just clean off all of it with a solvent that's not gonna hurt the hoses. I use AutoInt's New Car Prep. IMO rustproofing rubber hoses is dumb anyhow and just factory carelessness.



How much you'll end up cleaning off will just depend on how damaged the stuff is. Sorry I didn't have more encouraging news, but this is just something that, well, most people find out about the hard way.