Monday, March 10, 2014

Painting the rocker covers and the rest of them

On Sunday I have finally decided to paint all the covers for the engine. At first I wanted to put them into an oven after painting of all 3 necessary layers, but after waiting for weeks to be able to get to an oven, I decided to do it at home and not waste any more time on waiting for someone not reliable!

So, few weeks back I have given the covers for sandblasting. Unfortunately at this time I didn't really knew the real difference between sandblasting with sand and with glass beads.
So the covers were sandblasted and therefore the surface was not as smooth as I would have liked to have it. But I thought I'd give it a try and cleaned the parts prior to painting with a silicone remover which has done a pretty good job in the past.

So, my decision was to use a VHT wrinkle paint in Black. Actually I wanted it in a special grey which is used for the Omori Z2 engine but VHT wrinkle was at this time available only in black and red. Also, a very big thanks goes to Denis (Tranq) who has kindly donated 2 black color spray cans and 2 red color ones as I would have not been able to organize those in Austria since the UK guys are not allowed to ship it and shipping from the States is ridiculously expensive. Unfortunately, with the last coat of the last part I ran out of the color so my painting of the inlet manifold will have to wait until I organize more cans from Tranq :)

Hovewer, the process was as described on the can or here: Build Threads

My steps were:
  1. Sandblasting the parts
  2. Cleaning them with silicone remover
  3. Preheating of the parts (not necessary, but since the parts were under 10°C i decided to do it)
  4. 1st layer horizontally
  5. 5 Minutes break
  6. 2nd layer vertically
  7. 5 Minutes break
  8. 3rd layer diagonal
  9. After that You need to have a lots of nerves or a good helper (thanks LiZ) and one heat gun per person to apply heat to the finished parts. I started with 300 °C setting but soon after I realized that this'll take too much time to get the job done so i set up 600 °C and gave it a go. And it worked. You only need to be patient and wait for few minutes and wave the heat gun around the whole parts. Take care not to stay long on one spot as people are describing that it'll sligthly burn the coat and You can start from the beginning.
 NOTE: The available room for this job was far away from clean and dustfree. And I have noticed dust particles on the parts after step 2 but it was already to late as i started spraying. All surface inperfections which were produced during sandblasting were covered by the three coats and allthough after the third one I was thinking that it looks like shit, the result was absolutely amazing. Also, the dust particles are somehow moved from the part surface to the coat surface during the process so after the paint has dried you can easily remove the "painted dust".
NOTE2: please take care not to leave any valuable stuff in the room during this process as the dust during the process is really aggressive and it will fly through the room and stick to everything in the way. Fortunately for me, my cellphone was (even though 2m avay from the painting surface) easy to clean!
NOTE3: please make sure that You paint with this paint in a room which has enough air. The best thing would be to stick to the description on the can and to paint outdoors. I was stupid enough to paint indoors and opened the window very late so I had serious headache for the next 2 days. So take care guys and girls as this paint really is dangerous!!

Now for the pictures:

After 1st coat (as You can see the surface really looks shitty at this stage):







Long after heating of the last coat:









Now, there is something which I have noticed and I don't really know how to avoid this, which is the bends and curves. Still, I'm very happy with the results:



Next thing is to organize more color and to paint the intake manifold, the twin turbo pipe and probably to try and see the effect on the heat shields of the turbos. Especially to find out if it can take the temperatures :)

Until then, stay tuned!

Cheers,
RoB