So I am in the middle of a long drawn out rebuild and painting the engine is one of the project goals. i want to paint the entire engine black except the side covers which will stay polished aluminum. The engine is out of the frame and I am planning on sand blasting the whole thing to prep it for paint, should I sand everything as well? Do I need to completely disassemble the engine to prep and paint it? I hope not. What types of paint do y'all recomend? any tips or recomendations for the process.

I am also planning on doing the head plug fix and adding a verslavy to her while she is out of the frame.

here is a long before pic just for fun.

No need to sand if you've blasted, unless you want a smoother surface.

What I did with mine -- and it's yet to be seen whether it will hold up -- was clean the engine with engine cleaner (duh) and a few other solvents on some tough spots. I did a test spot on the back of the crankcase to see how my paint would react with the existing paint. There was no bubbling or wrinkling, nothing rubbed off -- generally it seemed to be doing fine. So I sprayed the rest of the crankcase.

I already had cleaned the hell out of the cylinder head, including aircraft stripper. So I shot it with high temp engine primer, then silver high temp engine paint, then my color.

I had Bore-Tech blast and paint the cylinder black when they did the bore job. Their black was too glossy, so I shot some semi-flat high temp engine paint over it. Now the cylinder looks like old school iron cylinders.

We'll see what happens.

Any reason your redoing in powder?

A question for the do-it-yourself-ers: When you paint the jug, how do you get the edge of the fins back down to bare metal? I love that look but don't want to screw up my paint job trying to achieve it. I just got a media blaster for prep and was planning on using some BBQ high temp paint, can I just take a sander to the edges of the fins once it sets up?

Thanks for all the advice evereyone. I will be starting soon once I have fixed a few internals like valve seats, head plug, and verslavy install.  

Boofer wrote on 07/12/11 at 15:39:36:


Thanks!

I have not done the savage engine yet but here is a test pre-project.

Before


After


and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ_1D8NgBrc

I used play sand straight from the bag on the first few runs, but it kept getting clogged so I had to strain it and mix it with baking soda. After that it was good to go.




What was clogging up the blaster:

I think It is going to take a lot of sand and a lot of time. the worst part of the process is that you get sand everywhere. I am contemplating building some sort of blasting cabinet.