Thread: Painting an engine.

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Thanks all. Bart, no, never done one in the car except years ago when I had cars that I just wanted to make the engine room look better, so I would mask off everything and would spray can the engine. If you take your time, get everything really clean, remove as much as you can, then mask and spray, you can get a pretty decent job.

Pat, no offense taken, we had the same discussion, especially because of his last sealing issues. But he wants the areas around the intake to look as finished as possible so he decided to shoot the entire manifold to head mounting surface, then we will lay a gasket on it, trace around it, and scuff the hidden areas real good with scotchbrite pads. I think if we do that, use some good composite gaskets, and some good sealant, it should hold a seal. We are not going to use the normal tin pan gasket that they make for these 455's, Mondello told me they see a lot of problems with those sealing.

We didn't paint the intake manifold yet because we are going to take it to the machine shop for surfacing, or at least to see if it needs surfacing. We were getting some areas the last time we mounted it where it looked like some areas were not touching as much as others. Don had some minor sealing issues with this same intake years ago when he ran it on his 65 Olds convertible, so there might be some irregularities in the gasket surface. Once that is done we can sandblast it back to bare metal and do the same priming and painting as on the rest of the engine. He also wants to change the transmission color from black to this gold too.

We did find one downside to painting an engine with the epoxy primer and Imron system..........we forgot how expensive it is. We walked out of the paint store yesterday with the primer and it's hardener, the Imron and it's hardener, a few plastic cups, and the bill was $ 236.00. The local paint supplier only carries the Imron 192S hardener in quarts (we needed a pint) and that alone was $ 110.00. I think it was only about $ 75.00 the last time we bought the same product.

Don