Engine Paint

With the engine all buttoned up, it was time for paint.  I used "Motor Coater" in the Metallic Pontiac Blue that was used during the years my engine was produced. You can apply most of these kinds of paint with a brush.  I did that with the POR-15 I used earlier and it came out really nice.  However, since this was a metallic, it would have streaked on anything that wasn't cast iron, so I shot it with a spray gun.  All I had was my little 3.5 HP compressor with a 10 gallon tank.  I could shoot about one side of the engine before running out of air.  If you tried to paint a car with an HVLP gun and a small compressor like that, you would burn up the compressor before you finished the side of the car.

The engine was cleaned to the point of not having loose debris when it came back from the machinist.  The heads were really clean because he did quite a bit of work on those with new valve seats and things.

The Motor Coater system is just like the POR-15 paint system.  There is a degreaser that's used first.  That part of the process took forever.  I did a lot of soaking and a lot of work with a wire wheel to get it to the point where a cloth wiped clean and then it got some flash rust about as soon as it dried from the rinse.

After that comes the "Rust Blaster".  It's a phosphoric acid solution that converts the rust (iron oxide) into a zinc phosphate that is bound to the metal and to which paint can bind.  You don't have to get all the rust off and it's even advisable to have a little still on there instead of bare, shiny, clean metal.  You just can't have any loose rust.

Here's a before and after.  Some day I'll dress it up a little with some chrome valve covers and stuff, but for now, I'm more interested in getting it on the road than looking pretty on an engine stand.

For now, I've painted the stock intake to save some money.  I plan to upgrade it later.