I finally finished one of my major projects for the fall which was to paint at least one of my engines. It made sense to start with the 1972 18V engine that I have as it’s the one I’ll be rebuilding first and installing.
This block looked pretty decent after using engine degreaser to clean it as you can see below. The old block has a block heater installed so I removed this and replaced it with a standard freeze plug or whatever you want to call those things.
I attempted to get as much paint off as possible by using a pretty aggressive paint remover on the block. Covering the engine block with plastic wrap really helped in this situation as the paint stripper didn’t dry out.
A pressure washer quickly removed most traces of paint and any gunk that was stuck in the engine. I was debating having this block hot tanked but it appears so clean that I decided not to spend the money at this point. Compressed air worked wonders for removing all the crud and a blow drier got everything ready for painting before rust settled in. I used the new gaskets as templates for masking off areas where I didn’t want paint to be.
Here’s where it starts to go bad! My plan has always been to paint the engine Tremclad Wild Cranberry and a few test pieces I painted looked fine although I was a little concerned about how weak in colour the paint was. It almost has a transparency to it. As I had a few cans of this paint sitting around I gave it a try and this is what the engine looked like after 2 coats. Definitely not covering very well.
This is what the engine looked like after 4 coats of paint. What you can’t really see in this photo is that there is a distinct brownish cast to the paint and it doesn’t look anything like the spray can that it came out of. I think that the grey etching primer is showing through and changing the colour.
Anyway, that’s it for this episode. Time to let the paint dry for a week and decide what to work on next. I’ll unscrew my beer form the oil filter holder and have a drink!
[…] writing this post on the same day as Painting the MGB 18V engine but in reality about a week has passed since I first painted my MGB GT’s engine. Guess what, […]