*STILL IN ASSEMBLY STAGES, THINGS WILL BE CHANGING*
After a many failed attempts at painting the engine bay w/ it fully assembled(w/ a spraybalm can), I realized that the only way to do it right was to take EVERYTHING out and clean, strip, sand, prime, sand, wash, seal, and finally paint and clearcoat the whole thing. This has got to be one of the most strenuous jobs there is, right up there with diagnosing an internitent driveablity issue. Scraping away almost 30 years of gunk, grease and old paint is no minor ordeal, and stripping everything out of the engine bay is a major undertaking. Luckily I already had the body off the frame, as well as the front clip off the cab, so I just threw the cab up on the lift, put it at a comfortable working level and went to town on it. To do it all it took me about 2-3 days to get it ready to actually paint, and I am still trying to get it back together the way I want it.
All the wires under the hood were moved and re-routed, every wire I could move was ran behind the dash instead of outside across the firewall, and only the headlight harnesses and the main power feeds to everything inside are under the hood now. Running dual batteries allowed me to keep things to one side or another without having to cross power wires from one side of the truck to the other.
I also sandblasted all the small brackets for the front clip, like the headlight buckets, hood hinges, fender brackets, basically everything from the cab forward was stripped and painted with Dupont basecoat/clearcoat to match the rest of the truck.
And finally the core support was stripped, smoothed, primed, sanded and painted as well.
