Engine Painting
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Painting an engine and the engine compartment is a pretty fiddly process
which, if done by a shop, can become quite expensive and if done by
yourself, is patience taking to say the least.
The first thing that you will need to do is to paint all of the front end components. In most cases these parts are black semi gloss and they can be detailed with a good quality spray bomb. A quick caution here. If you are using spray bombs for any of your detailing you will have to remember that the paint comes out of them a lot thinner than a gun. For that reason you have to build up quite a few more coats than you would do with a spray gun. With a gun the worry is that the paint will be on too thick which can be a problem on mechanical parts. With the bombs just a couple of coats will give you no real depth and the paint will wear off and chip away very quickly, meaning a lot of touching up down the line. You should likely put on about six coats to get adequate coverage and durability. Don’t try to compensate for the paint's thinness by trying to do it all in one spray. If you rush too much runs will be inevitable. Let each coat tack up before you apply the next. Often the time between coats will be given by the manufacturer. Aside from black semi gloss paint for the front end components, you will also have quite a few other things under the hood that will go black. If you are lucky the firewall will go black but many manufacturers paint the firewall body color. In some rare cases the inner fenders will also be body color. If this is the case then you will need to take a trip to the paint shop to have all of the body color work done. If you have lots of black and want a good deep rich finish then that should also be done by the paint shop after you or they have done any repairs and prep work required to make the job paint ready. Extra holes should be welded up, dents repaired and any fitting should be done before paint. Fitting is pretty important as far as inner fenders and the front cradles and supports are concerned because if the car has had an accident in its past you may find things not fitting well during assembly. Sometimes old damage can be overlooked when an engine compartment is a greasy ball of dirt. When all the bits are fresh and new looking anything untoward will leap into focus. Color choices under the hood can often be critical. If you are doing a prewar car, the visibility of many of the front end and engine components meant that even new they would receive careful attention from the manufacturer. Body colored or complementary colored frames and running gear are the norm rather than the exception with antique cars. Postwar cars often had quite drab engine compartments with the engines being painted rather dull colors, complemented with either gloss or semi gloss black paint and quite a bit of natural, cadmium plated or coated metal. The thing is that if you are going to show a car, all of these have to be faithfully reproduced which means firstly that you have to be quite sure what colors are on what. You may have removed a painted brake booster from your car but that could easily be a rebuild from days gone by. It may have been originally cadmium plated or some other rust preventative coating. Painting it will usually raise eyebrows with those who know, if originality is what you are shooting for. Don’t be put off by this however. You probably won’t have to go running all over looking for places to get various parts plated and anodized and whatever else lurked below the hood. There are now, from suppliers like Eastwood and Bill Hirsch in the States, detailing paints that reproduce the look of natural aluminum, cast iron, cadmium plating and most other special coatings. Some of these, like the cad plate, are multi coat applications which come in kits of four or five different colors which when properly applied are indistinguishable from the original. Some like the cast paints not only reproduce the color of cast perfectly, they are also high heat so can be used very effectively to coat exhaust manifolds which normally rust very quickly after detailing. If you are painting the manifolds with high heat paint make sure to follow the instructions. Some need heat to cure properly so will have to be applied very close to your first start up, while other air dry quite effectively. In either case make sure you get a good build up of paint or you will get some rust coming through even with the paint. The color of your engine is, with show cars, critical. Manufacturers used to change engine colors quite often in the sixties and the right color will be critical to getting you a trophy. |
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