[oregonjoe]

While I was waiting for my head to come back from the shop, I worked on cleaning parts and doing some detail work. A friend let me come over and use his bead blaster to clean up the valve covers and intakes. Boy – what a fun gadget to have! Make everything look like new. Uses air pressure to shoot tiny glass beads and reach into all the places you can get sandpaper in. After about three hours, I had some nice looking parts. So nice in fact, I decided not to paint them like the original but just to clear coat them and keep the natural aluminum finish.

For the valve covers, I masked them painters tape and used several new razors and traced the relieved outlines make a cutout. Pressed the making tape hard along the edges to expose the outlines and cut away the material. Be sure to clean everything with Lacquer thinner before you mask.




Then spay with high temp paint in several very light passes. The trick is to get the paint carrier to evaporate between each pass which takes just a few minutes. It took about 10 very light passes to get it built up enough. The reason for this is that if you spray too heavy, the paint just builds up in the depressions and flows overt he top of the masking which is not what you want because when you try to remove the mask it will just tear the paint off with it. What you are trying to do is keep the paint just in the relief’s and not on the surface of the mask. Another thing I found is that the initial passes doesn’t stick to well and paint tends to run down hill. By lighter coats and waiting in between, it gets tacky and then next coats stick better.

Now here is the important part, do not let the paint dry. Wait only about 20 minutes after the last coat to peel off the masking. Again, if you wait too long, the making will be too embedded with the paint and just peel the paint off or tear the masking so you can’t get it off. Doing this while still wet (tacky) makes it real easy and gets a clean surface.

Once the mask is removed just a little cleanup is needed with some lacquer thinner and a CLEAN rag. Because the paint is just in the relief, any other paint can be removed by warping the rag around your finger and just wiping the surface – comes off real easy and leaves a nice clean edge.

When done with the clean up I sprayed several coats of clear high temp paint to give the surface a nice look and protect the aluminum from corrosion. The clear coat also helped clean up the lettering and make them stand out.



All the other aluminum parts a coat of clear coat too.