Man, this is slow going.
I spent the weekend trying to clean the cases, jugs, head, etc. to get it ready for painting.
I assembled the whole engine pretty much hollow (with just the valves in place)... with the idea that I might be able to prevent water and blasting media from getting inside. It' worked pretty well, but the right way to do this would have been to blast everything before doing any machine work. Oh well... next build.
Here's what I've did:
- Sprayed the whole engine with Gunk engine de-greaser - let it sit for 15 minutes
- Sprayed it down with a pressure washer (just water)
- Soda blasted everything - this worked but not all that well as I only have a 10 gal 120V air compressor - this part took forever
- Sprayed it down again with the pressure washer
- Sprayed everything with Clean-strip paint remover - let that sit for 15 minutes
- Sprayed it down one more time with the pressure washer
- Spent most of this morning/afternoon manually sanding and brushing
Pictures of the end result attached.... I'm not there yet, but I think I'm getting close.
I'm taking everything back apart and will work some more on each part individually with wet/dry and scotch-brite pads.
I think I'm getting there, except for between the fins on the jugs. I don't think my soda blaster/air compressor was strong enough get all the pant off in there (one of the reasons I hit the hole engine with paint stripper). The head cleaned-up better, I think I managed to remove all the paint from the head.
I used both the Eastwood small job soda blaster and a $19 media blaster gun (with a little hopper on top of it) that I got at Harbor Freight. The $19 gun actually worked better... as I Eastwood blaster sometimes had trouble drawing up the soda.
Cevan - you're absolutely correct... night and day using the proper soda blasting media versus the cooking variety.
Does anyone have any tips on how to make sure all the paint between the fins on the jugs/cylinders is removed? I really don't want to paint over old paint.