Finish Painting the Motor

Today I painted some engine parts.  Months ago I decided, for some crazy reason, not to use rattle-cans to paint this motor.  My inner sensibility, or maybe my ego, told me that rattle cans were too "unprofessional", and that I could get a better paint job using pint cans of primer, engine enamel,  black enamel, and a detail spray gun.  Mr. Mechanic thinks I'm nuts... after all, it's a Ford, not a Duesenberg.

So, was this a good idea?  In a word, no.  I have found out just how inconvenient it is to use a paint gun for a small job... it takes much longer to mix & transfer paint and clean the gun than it takes to do the actual painting.  But, this is a "learning experience", right?  Anyway, I've committed to this path, I already have the paint, so I might as well finish.

Here's one of the guns that Uncle Packard loaned me:

DeVilBiss Type EGA Series 502 with Binks paint cup & bail

This is a professional detail gun, and Uncle Packard thinks very highly of it.  Sadly, before I used it, I attempted to attach a small regulator valve to the air inlet, and ended up cracking the aluminum housing in two!  OK, that was embarrassing.  I was able to put it back together with superglue, and it holds air, but you can see the crack line just above the air inlet.  I don't trust it to paint with.  There is something about having 4 ounces of paint in your hand that makes chasing an errant air hose around the room a very bad idea.  So now I'm looking on eBay for a reasonably priced replacement (new ones are over $200).  This happened over a month ago, and I'm still looking.

In the meantime, I needed a gun I can use.  Harbor Freight is an amazing store... I bought a look-alike Chinese detail gun for $10:

The paint cup is actually interchangeable (Unk's gun is really a hybrid... a DeVilBiss gun with a Binks cup).    This gun did yeoman's work painting the block, heads, pan, intake manifold, valley cover, and just about everything else that is "Ford Red".  I should mention that I decided to undergo the additional inconvenience of priming everything first... using 2-part epoxy primer (because that's what the guy at the paint store said to use).  Mr. Mechanic REALLY thinks I'm nuts.

Even though it works well, cleaning this gun is a pain.  In addition to the nozzle, it has a siphon tube full of paint that must be cleaned.  Well, last week I went back to Harbor Freight to pick up another $10 gun for a spare.  I came back with this $13 gun:

Big spender, huh?  This model has a much smaller paint cup, but more importantly it is a gravity feed gun, not a siphon gun.... thus, no siphon tube.  Much easier to clean!  Woo Hoo!  I used it to shoot gloss black enamel on the starter, generator, vibration damper, water pump pulley, etc. and in the process cleaned it several times.  Not quite as easy as clearing the tip on a rattle can, but not bad.  Here are some of the parts I painted:

Water pump pulley, vibe dampener, starter, breather cap

Generator mount, trans filler bracket, steady rests, trans air outlet

I also had to touch up some red paint on the motor.  The oil pump was un-painted, as was the oil filter adapter and breather cover.  The oil pump is on the bottom of the engine, next to the pan.  I wasn't about to crawl under the engine to paint it, so I decided to rotate the engine on the stand.  Problem is, with the heads on the engine is very top heavy in the stand... there is almost no way I could get it back upright by myself.  So, I rigged a chain around the back of the engine stand, and connected it to the engine hoist (the towel is there to prevent chipping the paint):

My "engine rotator"!  Note that the oil pump is primed, but not painted.

I didn't use the spray gun for the oil pump, because I didn't want to dull the finish on the rest of the engine with overspray.  Instead, I used a foam brush - actually two, one for primer and one for engine enamel.  I then used a stiff narrow brush to paint all of the bolt heads.  It took several coats.  I had to rotate engine over pretty far to reach all of the pan bolt heads.

The brushes worked great!  The foam brush laid down a nice coat on the cast iron, and the stiff brush worked well on the bolt heads, even the hard to reach ones that a spray gun couldn't have done well.  Plus, they were disposable... no cleaning!  Once the oil pump and bolts were painted, I carefully used the engine hoist to rotate the engine back to vertical.

Here's the motor with the valve covers and oil filter installed.   Note the great paint job on the bolt heads!

On a more serious note, I took Dad to the oncologist yesterday.  If Dad is going to ride in this car, I think I need to hurry up with the restoration.