Cleaning the muffler

The regular reader (all one of you ) will recall the saga of my cleaning the engine by putting it in the dishwasher on a heavy wash cycle. Well like most of my bright ideas it didn't really pay off, although it did leave a nasty oily residue in the bottom of the dishwasher which lingered for weeks.

I now need to clean the muffler. It turns out that because the engine burns oil and gas the muffler gets choked with a gunky residue and this has been know to solidify, block the muffler and of course stop the engine. Apparently the solution is to barbecue the muffler. Yes indeed you put it on the barbie and get it up to 500 degrees. This supposedly burns out all the crap and you are good to go. Now my BBQ is up on the mountain but I think I have a better solution. As I understand it, an electric oven on the self clean thingy gets up to 800 degrees so I could just bung it in and clean the oven. Of course I need to smuggle this past the old girl and therein lies the fly in the ointment.

I have no idea how the oven works. BUGGER!