I am just days away from the assembly of my first rebuild. Last night I got some Duplicolor High Temp Engine Paint (blue and silver) and some masking tape. I quickly decided that it was going to be too much trouble masking off the surface of the side housings and the sides of the rotor housings so I assembeled the good irons wanted to paint with some old boat anchor rotor housings and bolted them together. I then spent 30 mintues masking off all the gasket surfaces and filling all the bolt holes. I have since put on 2 coats of paint on the irons.

Because I want them a different color I will do something simular to paint the rotor housings. I have some bad irons I will bolt them to before I paint them.



BTW: I know that most people do not paint their rotor housings. After spending considerable amount of time scrubbing them they still have gray and black spots all over them (the shape of the spots looks almost like mold growing on a tree).



Did I go through too much trouble?

Did I really have to be this careful about not getting paint on the wear surfaces of the engine?

How do you paint your housings?

 

I would imagine that any paint that gets on the wear surfaces of the engine would flake off fairly quickly and then would be another contaminent (along with dirt etc.) in your oil supply. I am unsure as to whether this would hurt your engine, but I can't imagine it being good either....

 

just spray some carb cleaner on a rag and wipe off the overspray

 

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That's the way!



And if you want to quickly tidy up your housings you can either get them bead blasted or give them a real light coat of aluminium paint.

 

Duh, I musta had a brain fart.

 

My idea of bolting the housings together with some junk rotor housings worked pretty good. I sill had some paint run down onto the water jacket area of the housings but nothing that a razorblade and some 600 grid sandpaper can't take care of. Next time I will put some news paper between the housings to create a gasket type of seal to keep the paint from running between them.



Once all the tape was off the irons look amazing. The paint turned out with a much higher gloss finish than I expected.



I figured I would try a different technique for the rotor housings. I cut up some paper to cover the rotor opening and most of the water jackets and just taped the rest of it up. I did not bother trimming the tape down I just left it sticking up. I filled all the threaded holes with paper or bolts and taped over the exahust port.

I just put a 3rd coat of "Cast Aluminum" color on one rotor this morning and will start with the other rotor this afternoon (am only doing one at a time so I only have to trash two spark plugs with paint using them to plug the spark plug holes).

 

i used some steel wool to clean up housings also if carb cleaner doesnt work.

 

That is exactly what I did on my old 6 port, I used dome old housings, and then clean the excess with razor blade....

 

I wouldn'yt worry about the overspray. I mean you change your oil after a couple hundred miles anyway.

 

For my rotor housings, I sand blasted them to clean em so that I could paint onto a nice even surface. After they were done, I sorta liked how it looked, so I cleared them with some of the high temp stuff. I think they came out pretty nice.