Thread: Painting an engine.

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I didn't want to hijack chevygirl396's thread on painting engines so I thought I would just do a separate thread on how we painted my Son's Olds engine today. As I mentioned in her thread, we have always used epoxy primer and topcoated it with our favorite brand and color of paint, and do it exactly as you would paint anything else, such as a car body. The paint holds up to the heat just fine and lasts for years if you do it right.

While you can paint an engine that is all assembled, and we have done that, my Son Dan likes to paint them in pieces, so we paint the block, the heads, the intake, oil pan, and parts like that separate from each other then will assemble them when they dry. The reason he likes to do it this way is so the paint isn't covering gaskets and if you ever need to remove a head or something it won't pull any paint that is stuck over the seams.

The engine was originally painted black when we first built this car but this time around he wanted to do it in a gold like they used on early Olds engines. Yesterday we went to the local auto refinishing supply shop and picked out a Dupont Imron fleet gold color that we felt was close to the Olds color, as well as some Dupont epoxy primer and appropriate hardeners.

Dan spent all day yesterday prepping the block with a roloc disc, then cleaning it with laquer thinner and a stainless steel brush. He also spent a lot of time masking off the areas that don't get painted. That was the most time consuming job, it took him probably 8 hours with blue masking tape and an exacto knife, but it pays dividends as the job comes out much better and neater.

Today we had nice warm weather and we got all the parts moved out into the parking lot so they could be primed and then painted. Here are some pictures of what the parts looked like in bare steel after the final wipedown with wax and grease remover.

Don