Engine compartment paint

Two weeks, I said in May. I'll let the primer dry for two weeks until I'll give it a final coat of semi-gloss black. After 21 weeks of drying I guess it's time to crawl back into the garage and start sanding and preparations for the paint job.

The engine compartment had a lot of drips and I had to use rough grit sandpaper for those areas. But mostly I managed with 250 grit.

The wheel well side turned out to be easier. Epoxy primer needs to be sanded to ensure good adhesion for the clearcoat. The color turns gray when the surface is ground. A friend of mine suggested polyurethane coating for the engine compartment. It forms a good shockproof surface and will not get scratched if it is hit by a wrench while fine-tuning his huge aluminium big-block engine. I discussed this issue with my candidate-for-body-paint-job. He absolutely refused the idea and voted for acrylic based paint. I do not want to argue with a specialist so acrylic shall it be. And due to the fact that my wrench is so small and my six-banger is so narrow, I felt OK with the decision.

The windshield window frames of a convertible will be covered with mouldings to such an extent that no body color will be seen. Only the inner side of the pillar will be visible. My interior will be black so I decided to do the frames and dashboard as well.

A lot of vacuuming was needed until I was able to apply silicone remover and Dinitrol 410 seam sealer and as soon as this was done I proceeded with spraying the Spies Hecker Permacron® 630 . This was done using wet-on-wet technique straight after I had finished with seam sealer so sorry, no pictures of that phase. Actually the sealer includes polyurathane but is compatible with the acrylic enamel. Here are a couple of pictures of the finished product after three coats of paint.

I ordered something between glossy and matt. The guy at the paint shop said he mixed 70% of the gloss-compound. The result may be too shiny but looks fine to me.

I had prepared the UCA's, LCA's and the strut rods and handled them as well.

The dash is now ready for the installation of the mono AM radio.

Looks quite menacing now, like UFO has turned out to Darth Vader's battleship.

To my opinion this paint job succeeded well. There can be seen a few scrathes from using the rough sanding paper but once the engine is back in they'll be difficult to be noticed.