Media | Articles
5 Tips for Painting Your Project Engine
Depending on who you are and what you enjoy, a greasy, grimy, and nearly unrecognizable engine might be exactly what you want. You’re probably in the minority, though. For those of us who take the time to tear down an engine and refresh as much as we can mechanically, going the extra mile to dress up the parts and pieces before they go back together is worth the effort to in order to create a professional-looking final product.
The best part about painting an engine is that the process is not particularly difficult or demanding compared to painting an entire car. A few rattle cans can take any engine from a bland lump of metal to an eye-catching piece that shines both when you push the accelerator and when you pop the hood. Here are five tips to keep in mind when it comes time to doll up that chunk of iron or aluminum.
Remove Your Flash
If you want paint to stick and look good, removing the sharp edges and leftover material from the casting process is a must. I picked this tip up from Hagerty’s resident engine-rebuilding expert, Davin Reckow. Initially, I thought he removed the exterior casting flash simply because he had the tools out after doing the same to the interior of the block and heads to assist with oil drainback, but after seeing a few of his projects painted, it became clear the effort was well worth the work.
Make Sure All Your Work Is Actually Done
When you think it’s time to paint, take one more day to run through the checklist of work completed vs. work needed, before ordering your paint and busting out the masking tape. Once you start the masking process, it is a real pain to go backward and it often risks damaging your finish.
Clean Is Likely Not Clean Enough
Engine building is a clean-room affair, but painting is even more so. Old engines were typically caked and coated with grease and oil for decades, plus anything that applied to the raw parts after machining or other work. Use the paint process as the opportunity to go through and get everything for your engine flawlessly clean. Davin recommends that everything be “ready-to-assemble” clean before going into the paint booth. Taking the time to paint a part that still needs to be cleaned before assembly is asking to accidentally goof up that fresh paint. Even the masked-off areas should be spotless.
Marketplace
Buy and sell classics with confidence
Use the Gaskets for Masking
When it’s finally time to lay down some tape, don’t think too hard as you are putting it on. Over-mask and then use the gaskets to trim the tape back to ensure the paint covers everything it needs to and nothing it doesn’t. This also helps keep paint from getting oil-soaked and creating leaks, since the gasket will seal between the unpainted surfaces, but the paint line will disappear between the parts when they join.
Use the Right Product in the Right Place
On the human scale, engines get very hot. On the larger scale, not so much. Although parts of an engine do reach temperatures that require special coatings that will not bake or flake off, the vast majority of components will not exceed the roughly 220-degree operating temperature of the engine. That means regular automotive paint will hold up just fine. Davin has the Redline Rebuild engines sprayed with a standard automotive primer/base/clear system, and the durability and oil resistance have been great. So long as the top coat is a catalyzed product, there have not been issues.
Find more values
Search for prices of other cars, trucks, vans and motorcycles
One thing I hate is when someone assembles everything – with gaskets – and then paints. It looks awful to me. Please, please, paint your individual parts and then assemble!
As for painting gaskets. Sometimes people have to as that is how it came from the factory. It was a common thing. Never looked good but they were just getting them out the door.
Painting the engine is not really hard. Just get it clean. The hard part is keeping paint on the heat cross overs.
The first thing at the Pontiac nationals many do is get the paint out and touch up the cross overs.
We used to race so we general had our blocked off and it would last. We also did not winter drive.
Today we have plastic intakes with no heat in them.