'84 300TD engine bay painting
 

I friend is having me replace the engine in his TD, as the old one was ran on veg oil, and has lost compression. While the engine was out, he was cleaning the spilled VO around the driver side of the engine bay. Upon doing so, the degreaser was taking off the paint down to the primer. He/we decided to go all the way and remove as many parts as we could, and clean and paint the entire engine bay. Many hours of removing parts, cleaning, and masking, the job was completed yesterday. We used aluminum foil and masking tape to cover everything that we did not want painted. The aluminum foil worked awesome for masking, and it was very easy to remove afterward. Check it out:

more photos
 

Now comes the seemingly endless task of putting it all back together! I hope I can remember where every little clip, bracket, fastener and wire went!

That looks awesome, not even rusted by the battery tray!!!

What type of paint did you use?

Looks great Rollguy! I will be painting the engine bay of my TD also here in a couple months when I have the engine out. Definitely interested to know what you used for paint.

dankly

What you don't see is the repair with fiberglass in that area.

Just basic single stage with hardener from an automotive paint store.

Looking Good !
 

That's a great masking tip Rich, I hope I remember it .

Was it Lacquer or Acrylic Enamel paint ? .

Could have been urethane or enamel, but not lacquer.

I notice the trans looks like it's still installed. Some threads say engine and trans have to be pulled as a unit? Do they? What's easiest or the deciding factor? Details?

Looks beautiful. Why did you use foil instead of paper or plastic?

It is actually harder to pull the trans and engine together. Besides, only the engine was needed to be changed, the trans was fine.

The foil works WAY better than paper or plastic. It clings without tape, and is much easier to remove than paper or plastic and tape.

Looks great. Now you need to ponder if you'll reinstall the old components that eventually fail like the brake booster or install a rebuilt one. "If it ain't broke ..." works better for me since rebuilt isn't always better.

The two 1964 & 65 Mopar cars I bought had their engine bays "purtied up" by prior owners. They just popped the hood and rattle-can sprayed black paint everywhere, over rust, gunk, wiring, components. I hate when gomers do that. I had to strip it all down, get rid of the surface rust and paint properly.

Both cars also had the underdash wiring hacked up. Probably "professional" mechanics snipped the wiring to swap the turn signal, then reconnected with a mass of butt crimps. They didn't know to release the pins from the connector housing with a little screwdriver which takes just a few minutes. Had to fix all that.

I'm working on restoring my Grandpas '64 Oldsmobile. I just painted the engine bay not long ago and used the aluminum foil trick. It is insanely effective. I stumbled upon it somewhere online. It is literally like aluminum foil was designed for this purpose.

Your engine bay is looking great now, can't drop a nice new engine in a dirty bay.