Honda N600 Engine Rebuild, Part 4

For those of you who know me, I'm condensing extraodinary amounts of time in this Honda N600 car and engine post sequence - in fact, years.  I don't work too fast.  In this case, parts are hard to come by and since the car is in Alaska, I also have to get the parts here. 

Anyway, the engine is out of the car and powerwashed.  It's time to tear it apart.

 In my very limited experience, the greatest amount of time is cleaning parts.  This photo is looking at the top of the engine head.  You can see the valves clearly.  The cam chain is in the middle of the photo held up with a black and white wire.

The gasket surfaces have to be clean and "unmarred" by wire brushes or sharp tools - especially since the engine is almost all aluminum. 

It was very difficult and time consuming to scrape the old gaskets off and make sure the mating surfaces were clean and flat.

I tried all sorts of foaming and cleaning products to loosen the gaskets, but in the end - a sharpened scraper used very judiciously was the only thing that worked.

But you have to be very careful not to scratch or ding the mating surfaces.