What do you do when you have the motor out of your truck?
This was another journey down the rabbit hole… The paint job after the last rebuild left a lot to be desired. On top of that, the paint had burned off tops of the exhaust ports. Now it was extremely shabby looking and that just wasn’t acceptable. Since I had the engine out of the truck, I had the opportunity to repaint the block. While this could have been out and back in the truck in a few days, the extra time and effort it took was definitely worth it. To do this right, I had to disassemble the motor by removing heads so they could be sand-blasted. A wire wheel would not have been able to achieve the same results with the curves & contours in the heads. The block however, was easy to access with a wire cup on a grinder.
Once the heads were off, I did not want to fully tear them down. So I bought some inexpensive stamped steel valve covers to keep the valves protected from the sand. I left the spark plugs installed until the very end so as to not pit the threads. I did remove them and quickly clean out the ports, just enough to clean up any rust that had developed. After the blasting was finished, I needed to ensure there was no sand left anywhere inside the cavities. Thoroughly pressure washing the assemblies took care of that. Now it was time to properly paint the heads and the block. Once the paint was dry, the motor was reassembled and ready to go back into the truck. The process overall took about two weeks working a few hours each day to get the work done. The results speak for themselves.
