So I finally got my brother in law to come over with his Cherry-picker and we yanked the motor out. Here's the before and afters, I stripped it down, used a putty knife to scrape the grease and dirt chunks off, Hit it with some engine degreaser and finished it off with "OVEN CLEANER" As it loosens baked on grease, paint and other stuff that normal degreaser can't handle. Great stuff. Wire brushed the rest, taped it off and painted it Chevy Orange because it's close to what the car will be.
The Oil pan and block were "Chunky" rusty and took some doin to get it all off. Stripping the block was fun though, been waiting for over a year to do it. And I did'nt break a single bolt, AMAZING!!
The front cover, Oil pump, Valve cover, intakes, carbs, water inlet and outlets will ALL be Polished to a beautiful aluminum luster. I just love the look of polished aluminum. Don't you? Before pics below.
And now it slowly comes together. I polished the whole front cover, oil pump and water inlet neck and the outer lip of the water pump. No need to do the whole pump because the pulley will cover 85% of the pump. I also cleaned and painted the alternator mount and crank pulley. This Chevy Orange is kinda sticken on me. Now I wonder if they make it in a Non-motor (high temp) color?
So today (9/25/09) I got the Oil pan done and on with a new gasket and replaced ALL of the bolts with Stainless Steel hardware. All the bolts in the front cover, water pump, oil pump, inlet, outlet and front inspection plate are also Stailess Steel. I think I dropped over $100 on SS bolts,nuts and washers this week. Not to mention the $50+ bucks on 500 degree paint, paint stripper, hi-temp clear coat, oil filter, gasket kits and rust and paint removing media (sandpaper-wire wheels and abrasive surfacing disks. And do you know what a pain in the ass polishing aluminum and steel is?? I do, and I turned black from all the aluminum polishing in the last 2 days. It's all worth it though.....
This is steel and a bitch to polish, how's it look?? And this is what I really want the tranny to look like but I don't have THAT much time on my hands. I can't even imagine doing the whole thing.
Here are the before sots, just after I used aircraft paint stripper to remove the black paint and after I Wet sanded a little to get the bigger chunks off and smooth out some road rash scrapes.
And these are the mid point pics after using surfacing pads to remove a few 1000's of an inch of metal all over, to remove pits, scrapes, paint and 35 years of crap and bad mold process.
Here are the pits and crap I had to get thru to get her to shine. The here's what a white guy looks like after polishing Aluminum for a few hours, and it only got worse from there.....
After about 8 hours of sanding, buffing, polishing, painting and turning colors, She's all done. Thanks god The motor only has 1 valve cover, or I'd say paint the bastard. 2 days to polish it is enough.
The paint dried today so I scraped the lettering and inner fins then hit them with a 2 inch surfacing pad on a die grinder. Cleaned everything up with acetone and we're done. Finally.
