Curious as i've never tried polishing the intercooler pipes.... whats involved? What grit sand paper did you start with?
Also, I see you didn't move over the satellite tv mod.
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Curious as i've never tried polishing the intercooler pipes.... whats involved? What grit sand paper did you start with?
Also, I see you didn't move over the satellite tv mod.
I start with 220 dry up to 600 wet, but he might do something different. I also use a bench grinder and various polishing compounds.
Very nice work. :cool:
Jeremy
180 until all the casting marks are gone, then I switch sanding direction every step up till 600. That way you know all of the courser sanding marks are removed. Then polished with a buffing wheel on an angle grinder with black, red tripoli, and white rouge. Although I will be skipping black as it seems to do the same as red and I will be trying some other color combinations. Some people say the green bar(for stainless steel) gives better results than the white.Quote:
Originally Posted by NickS VR4
Weight Reduction ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by NickS VR4
I started to tackle my front calipers, they currently are painted red with caliper paint and the paint has seen better days. Disassembled them, Cleaned them in an ultrasonic cleaner as well as all of the hardware. I then polished the letters as it will make it easier to wipe the powder from them before they go into the oven. Unfortunately, there is a few gouges in the letters that I couldn't do anything about. I etched the aluminum and scrubbed them up with a red scotchbrite pad and was ready to shoot the powder. I bought the powder from a local powder coat shop that claimed it was 1lb, when I got home and weighed it, it wasn't even half a pound. I figured that would be enough, however after spraying on the powder, I had to wipe the powder off of each letter without disturbing any of the other powder. This proved to be much harder than I thought with the caliper hanging from a hook. By the time I got it right on one caliper half, I didn't have enough powder to do the rest of the calipers so I just blew it all off and put them away until I order more red, don't want to have different color calipers because of different batches of powder. Anyways, here are some pics, will post up more when they go back together.
http://i972.photobucket.com/albums/a...ure3002977.jpg
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Been lazy about updating this thread, only real progress I have since the last post is powder coating some random brackets and cleaning some items. Getting the hang of the powder coating but still having a couple issues. The silver color is called black chrome, I have only had 3 parts that actually came out the color it is supposed to look like. Every other part is way darker and just looks grey. It seems it is completely random, one of the parts that came out the right color was in a batch with 4 other parts that came out too dark. It looks awesome before clear, almost like real chrome, but unfortunately, it has to be cleared or it will oxidize. The last piece is the correct color.
http://i972.photobucket.com/albums/a...ure3003375.jpg
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So this is now turning into just a powder coating thread, but thats just the stage I am at now so it will go on for awhile. These next items are the 4 longer brake lines in the engine bay(non-abs lines). These took the longest of all the parts, the stock coating on them, even though chipping off in some spots, did not want to come off. A wire wheel ended up being the fastest way(still extremely slow). The other issue was that each one of these barely fit in my oven, hanging them wasn't an option as I didn't want a hook mark in the middle of the line and there is no way I would have been able to balance it in the oven without them hitting the wide. I found some scrap pieces of wood and screwed in a broken clutch slave cylinder on one end and a vr4 brake prop valve on the other, this gave me a port on each end to screw in the flare nuts. Each line required new mounting points and the last line had less than a 1/4" of clearance on all sides in my oven and I had to screw extra things into the wood to hold the slave cylinder up higher than the prop valve. It took me a couple days to figure out how to get that thing in the oven without touching any sides but I finally got it, forgot to take pics of it though. Of course, the wood was wrapped in aluminum foil to avoid any fire, lol. Because I was unable to take the flare nuts off the ends of the line, I had to deal with leaving the stock green coating on the last 1/2" but the blend spot where the 2 coatings meet gets covered when they are fully tightened.
http://i972.photobucket.com/albums/a...rakeline16.jpg
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The next batch of parts is several of the interior brackets that support the dash center console. I used matte black epoxy on these, even though these are never seen, they are always covered in rust. The rest of the interior pieces that I spray painted silver before will be getting this same treatment. Even though the spray paint has now had almost a year to cure without being handled at all, I can still peel the paint off with my fingernail. I cant peel the powder coat off with the tip of a screw driver.
http://i972.photobucket.com/albums/a...ure3003184.jpg
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Gas pedal assembly, dont laugh at the green workbench with flowers all over it, it was free and yet to be painted lol. The pictures don't do the pedal justice, the gloss black looks very good on this piece in person.
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Shifter: Eventually all the bolts, washers, etc on the car will be replated in either zinc-nickel or tin-zinc but they have a minimum batch price so I will have to do everything at once. That will be the last step and everything will have to be disassembled again for that.
http://i972.photobucket.com/albums/a...Picture916.jpg
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