I have a 74 year old friend who was born at home and has NEVER been to a doctor or hospital or any medical facility for anything. ( standard mandatory shots in the military excepted )
He does not tell other people to not go to a doc just because he hasn’t.
2001 f150 5 liter engines have the same issue. My husband wash3d the engine of one we had a few years ago and it caused a few hundred dollars worth of damage.
*Of course *people wash their engines if you want them to look nice. Then there are other people who never even look under the hood of their car and then wonder why they are always having maintenance issues.
If you are buying a used car you can tell a lot about how it has been treated by looking at how clean it is. Under the hood, the door jambs, the trunk, under the floor mats, dust on the hard to clean interior parts. Abuse or neglect is hard to cover up even with a good cleaning. A couple days of detailing your car pre-sale can add a couple thousand to the resale value. Keeping it clean all the time is even better. Some people do a major Spring cleaning of their house and others try to keep it clean all the time.
If you have an engine with leaks, oil, gunk building up, you should really address the cause of those issues before blasting the gunk off with high pressure. My 100k mile engine has no oil or grease spots, just some dust and in the winter some road spray dirt. But that is just me, and a couple million other guys. I clay bar it once a year and when I wax it, I even wax the door jambs.
What I use a couple times a year to wash the engine is just Simple Green household spray cleaner. Spray it on, wait 5 minutes, wash it off with the garden hose. Then there are several Armor All type products that can be sprayed on and wiped off after the engine has dried that makes the hoses, plastic parts and other things shiny and looking like new.
What the old guys in the classic car shows used to use to detail the engine compartment, before so many other products became available was just regular old Pledge furniture polish. Spray on, wipe off, looks great.
My M/C mechanic used to wash the engine before working on it if it was dirty. Would take the bike to the car wash and wash it, at full mechanic hourly rate, until it was clean.
He had a special contempt for riders who were too lazy to clean the engine before asking someone else to work on it, but he felt morally constrained to not get dirt inside the engine. Charging as much as he could for as little work as he could do was his compramise between angry contempt and destroying your engine.
I wash the engine in my car at wand washes once or twice a month in summer, one last time before the snow falls and it’s colder than Mars, then in the spring. Soap, then the rest of the car, then rinse the engine, then the rest of the car.
The only problems I had were the plugs in a Chrysler 318 engine (and the distributor in a '65 Chrysler) and the plugs in a Mustang with a 302.
As mentioned, if the engine’s clean and it springs a leak, coolant or oil, it’s a lot easier to spot it and the source of the leak. One time a mechanic thanked me for the clean engine. Another was amazed at the clean firewall in the '65 (he didn’t seem to give a damn about the engine. It was quite funny).
I don’t bother drying them. I just close the hood and drive.
There’s still inaccessible dirt on the engine in my present car. I’m not going to crawl underneath on a wet floor to wash the firewall side of a transverse engine shoe-horned in.
It looks good, though. And it probably runs cooler than it would if caked with crud.