If you are going to paint your calipers and maybe even stencil the logo on them as posted by Rick, you may want to consider filing/grinding the casting marks off. This is the photo of one of my fronts with a new black paint job.(I got the paint for Christmas.) I eliminated the casting lines with a Dremel and a file. IMO they now have a much better finished appearance with paint and without the ugly casting marks.

 

Looks great! I got my paint months ago and have been to lazy, er, I mean busy to do it. Did you just use a plain old metal file? Does look much better.

 

Very nice. Did you do the caliper bracket as well? The shot doesn't show it. How much time did you invest on the smoothing part of the project?

 

I had no idea what a "dremel" was so I found out:
http://www.modelersboatyard.com/dremel/

 

They look great. I am also interested in how much time and effort is required to smooth them.

I would like to prep them and send them out for a professional powdercoating.

 

To answer your questions -
My son is home from school for the holidays and he helped me. He provided the paint as a Xmas present! We did it over a two day period. First we jacked the car up with floor jack, bottle jack, and stands to get at all four at the same time. If you can do it this way, I highly recommend this to keep from stringing it out forever.

We did not disconnect the calipers from the hoses, simply hung it on a 2X6. We saw this technique on the board before. The grinding and filing was actually much easier than you might imagine. The material is cast iron and it is very easy to grind & file. The dremel with grinding stone was used only in the beginning to remove the bulk of the material. The finishing was done with a file. Both the caliper and the mounting bracket were filed. Of course the bracket was removed from the car and they needed as much filing as the calipers. The filing took about an hour with both of us working at it. It really was quite easy to dress them out with a good sharp file.

We put one heavy coat of paint on and let it dry over night. As you probably know the paint is a two part epoxy system and you only mix what you need for a ~30 minute period. The hardner supplied with the paint we received had some solids in it which caused the paint to be rough for the first coat. This was solved with wet sanding with 400 grit and then followed with a thinned second coat.

For the second coat, I filterd the hardner thru a nylon stocking to remove the solids after thinning it a touch with MEK. It appeared that some of the solids went back in to solution with the MEK. I used a nylon stocking as the filter cloth and it worked well. The second coat came out very smooth and dried quickly with the extra MEK.

Waited about 4 hours and carefully reassembled everything. Bottomline, a four to five hour job spread over a two day period. The extra hour we spent getting rid of the casting marks was well worth it.

 

Al, you got any spare MEK? That stuff is getting hard to get!

 

Al, where is all your stuff? My garage is crammed full of all sorts of crap, where is yours?

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by cthree:
[B]Al, where is all your stuff? My garage is crammed full of all sorts of crap, where is yours?

 

Al. Very nice pics and detailed report. Hope this will get moved over to FAQs. (I presume you told your wife what you were doing with the stockings. )

BTW. Is that a 6x6 holding up the back end?