Looks good! But you know you don't need that air pump delete pulley right?

 

yeah, after I installed it and started looking at the belt routing, it started to become rather obvious that I could have just used a shorter belt.

 

If I wanted to do my engine bay, there's places to get custom color mixed bed liner now. Less than perfect installs still look great. Basically indestructible and touch ups aren't too painful.

 

It would be an option if I had a normal color, but this paint is a 3 stage pearl.

 

You'll be hard pressed to match the pearl paint in the engine bay, and all the prep work to get the pearl to look good would add a lot of time to the build. For a driver I would get some eastwood underhood black and call it a day. The eastwood stuff looks better than the duplicolor semi gloss imho.

 

I would do underhood in white without pearl.

I remember looking at gm paint chips for 4th gen camaro, they listed underhood colors that were the sane as the exterior color only without metallic.

 

I absolutely don't want a non-matching white under the hood. It's either the pearl white, or it's black. I did, however, consider doing the pearl white with a satin clear instead of the gloss clear.

 

Too each his own.

I would rather have non matching white, then non matching black.

My underhood was satin black, and I thought it looked awful. It's apart to get painted orange now.

 

This is just my .02 but I think you should spray the entire car. Why not do it rich? I mean if your anything like me it'll bug the heck out of you knowing its two different colors.

and it would look so sick! But again that's just my opinion. I'm also a sucker for a nice pearl white.

 

lol, i think you've lost sight of what this car is for jim.

 

No way. The paint on the rest of the car, while FAR from show car quality, is perfectly fine for the driver that it is. If I keep the car, it'll need paint again in a few years, but I'm absolutely not taking on another full repaint now.

I'm trying not to, I swear! I just want the damned thing on the road so I can enjoy it while I get back to the IROC.

 

lol, well it's looking great man

 

Don't mismatch the white. Mismatched tones don't look right by any means. Sort of like when the urethane bumper changes color or there's been some body work and the paint wasn't matched right.

Black in the bay is a classic look (everything before '81 almost?), works fine. If you were doin the whole car I'd say hell yeah match the bay.

 

Last night I finally jumped into the engine bay and started dealing with it. Fortunately, the issues are really only in a couple spots. The battery tray and the lower radiator support are both full of surface rust, but fortunately no rot. Because I'm not completely tearing the car apart, I'm not sandblasting these areas like I should. I hit them with a wire wheel last night, and I'm going to apply some sort of rust inhibitor like POR-15 or Eastwood Rust Encapsulator, then after I finish prepping the rest of the engine bay, it'll all get painted body color. The K-member, steering and suspension parts will get slathered with the rust inhibitor as well, so I'm going to find one that provides a flat or satin finish.

 

Go with POR 15. Follow the directions. Make sure you apply a top coat per instructions as well.

About to shoot mine with it.

 

Progress pics from the last week or so.

I decided to go with some of the good old Permatex Rust Converter. Unlike POR 15, I felt this stuff would be a better product to use over a mix of rusty & painted metal, since I had no desire to strip all of the paint off of my lower radiator support.

So, here are pics of the battery tray and radiator support prior to application:




Here are the "after" pics. You can see that all of the rust turned black, and the painted areas were unaffected, other than being shiny. This stuff seems to stick ok, and turns the rust into a hard, somewhat smooth paintable surface.





Aside from that, I've continued sanding the engine bay, and cleaning up the power steering box and steering components. I also removed the headlights and filler panel so that I can clean them up, and paint things better. I'm amazed at how good the steering box cleaned up.



Next I've got to mask the engine bay, prime the bare spots and sand everything in preparation for paint. After I paint the engine bay, I'll need to re-mask the freshly painted areas so that I can paint the strut towers, k-member, steering junk, and other non-white stuff that I need to paint.

 

Well, tomorrow my "do or die" moment will be here. Over the last few nights, despite feeling awful because of a cold, I've been masking the engine bay in preparation for paint. My dad (body shop owner) is leaving for a 4+ month vacation on Monday, so I recruited him to help me paint the bay tomorrow. Unfortunately, I felt terrible last night so I wasn't able to get out there. Tonight I've got a ton to do. I've got to finish masking the bay, feather sand all of the bare spots & chips, sand the whole engine bay for paint adhesion, and prime the bare spots. I've also got the underside of the hood to prep, the hood hinges to prep, and the filler panel that goes between the radiator support and the front bumper to prep. Looks like I might have a late night tonight, but if all goes well, by tomorrow night I'll have a painted engine bay!

 

It looks like you had a lot to do. Did you get it all done?

 

After a 12 1/2 hour marathon, the bay is painted.

During the week I got the engine bay masked:


Thursday night I finished the masking and primed the bare spots with a rust-inhibiting primer:


Friday morning we started by covering the car (and my IROC, and my parts, and my tool box, and...), then sprayed some sealer over the primed spots. Typically you'd like to seal the whole area, but because the sealer is thinner than the paint, it would wind up getting places that I wouldn't be able to cover with white, so I elected to only seal the primed spots:


First coat of white base coat:


After another coat of white and the pearl midcoat:


I liked the satin finish so much that I almost left it this way, but the thing with pearl is that it doesn't have that same "pop" unless it's got the clear over it, so I went ahead and put 2 coats of clear on:





The paint job is far from perfect, but for an engine bay on a driver, I'm satisfied. After I unmask it I'm going to need to paint the strut mounts, and then use something like POR-15 or a similar product on the k-member before I can start putting the motor in.

 

Looks great!

 

worth every second of extra effort jim!

 

Got it unmasked tonight. Overall, it came out much, much better than I expected. I'm very happy with it.

 

Jim I am proud of you. You really stepped up to the plate! I am dreading the color change on my car just because of the engine bay!

You did it right! Good job!!!

PS I have vortec heads rebuilt and ready to go on my car and I am dying to know how it works out for you!!!

 

get this car done so you can get back on the IROC!

 

Updates?

 

Things have been slow lately. Between being busy and the heat/humidity, I haven't done a lot. Last night I started re-masking part of the engine bay and cleaning the steering box & steering linkages. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow I'll get those painted, then I need to paint the fuel & brake lines. After that, I need to paint the strut mounts, then POR-15 the k-member.

 

Looking nice .. It never ends with small details ..so worth it.. I'm doing the same thing ..mines didn't come out to we'll also i suck painting ..but it's a big difference

How you like the finish with por 15 .. Some pics I see look good .. And some I don't like

 

Don't know yet. I've never used POR 15 before so I decided to try it on the K member, but I'm not there yet. That's the last thing I'll do in the engine bay because right now I'm stepping on it to get in and outof there.

 

Ok .. Yea I got a guy coming over now to cut a notch and weld .. I used rattle can car grade stuff .. I really didn't have rust

It's a work out getting in and out

What are your plans for ac box and strut towers ?

I'm on the fence on what I want to do to improve the look of the a/c box I was thinking wrinkle black or dipping it idk tho

 

A/c box will get washed and armor alled. Strut towers will get the surface rust sanded off and repainted.

 

looking at the pics I suddenly have a craving for baked potatoes.

Looks good! How close were you able to get it to body color?

 

Considering that it all came from the same can of paint, pretty close.

 

snapped a couple pics of my progress tonight.

More masking! This time, it's to paint the strut mounts:



I also got the steering box and steering linkages painted tonight:

 

i never though about using aluminum foil for masking, but that makes a lot of sense! this way you just wrap and crush the foil, it's gotta be really user friendly, lol

 

I got the idea from one of my car magazines. For some of this goofy stuff, it works great. It's also nice in situations where you want to be able to paint through a mess of stuff, like the brake lines. I was able to just wrap those, and still have access behind them to get paint where it needed to go.

 

Progress. I painted the strut mounts, and unmasked everything. Excuse the unpainted power steering pump lines. I have a different color to paint those along with the brake & fuel lines.





And a little bling for my Corvette valve covers:


In between coats I've started to put the front end back together, though I need to powdercoat some bolts before I can get much farther. Later this week I'm going to try and get all of the metal parts of the air filter assembly sand blasted and painted.

 

Looking good Jim... the car that is! I like the valve cover bling!

 

That badge fit perfect in the valve cover indentation. All I had to do was grind part of the valve cover and grind part of the badge.

 

I second the Firebird on the valve cover, I like it.

 

I've made a lot of progress in the last week, but most of my pics are sitting on the camera, and those that I did download wound up blurry.

Anyway, the fuel lines and power steering lines are painted, and the fuel line brackets are painted and reinstalled. This week I also repainted the headlight buckets to get rid of all of the overspray that was on them from way back when I painted the car. While the headlights were out I cleaned up the lights and trim rings. I put those back together and reinstalled them. I also powercoated all of the bolts. I also reinstalled the panel between the radiator support and the front bumper. A while back I painted that black panel that attaches to the bumper. I also sandblasted and painted the factory air cleaner assembly, and picked up a new coolant bottle. Since I'm not reinstalling the charcoal canister, I wanted to utilize that area for my coolant overflow so that I don't have to cover up my nicely painted wheel wells. Overall, I'm quite happy with how this little bottle fits. I'm going to need to build a small bracket for the bottom mount to attach to, but for the upper two I'll just drill a couple holes in the body and attach the bottle with the factory plastic push-pins.

 

Tonight I got the K-member prepped and ready for the POR 15. I'm applying that tomorrow afternoon.

 

I wonder if this is going to be enough to cool the new motor?


After you do the POR-15 acid-etch treatment, you need to clean it off with water, then make sure it's completely dry, so I left the fan on it overnight.

Here's the k-member right before the POR treatment:



And here it is right after the first coat:



Overall it went on pretty good, but one spot (of course, one of the most visible) fish-eyed when I put the POR on it. It's one of the spots that wasn't rusty. I don't think that area was unclean, so maybe that acid etch wasn't on there long enough. Either way, hopefully it'll cover on the 2nd coat. If not, I guess I'll be hitting the k-member with a coat of chassis black after the POR dries. :-/

 

Wow, I love the new variable speed fan, just a power inverter plug and play lol

 

By the way... if you ever do this, don't wear shorts. I must have rubbed my calf on the painted k-member, and I practically had to rip off my skin to clean it off.

 

I tell my self that every time I work on the car but I always seem to have shorts on lol

 

2nd coat is on. This stuff dries to a nice satin/flat finish (I bought the satin, not the gloss). One small spot still seems to want to repel the POR, but overall I think I like it. I'll post pics after it dries.

 

This 2nd coat looks like it threw up on my K-Member. It dried totally uneven. Some of it is glossy, some of it is dull. Looks like I get the pleasure of sanding it and spraying it with Chassis Black like I should have done in the first place. Looks like this will be the last time I use POR 15.

 

2 coats of Chassis Black. Much better.

 

masked off the brake lines and the fuel vapor line:



Painted



unmasked:



I've got a couple odds & ends to paint, and then the upper cowl, but for the most part, the engine bay is pretty much done now.

 

Start dropping that motor plsss!!