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Next year, I'm planning on giving my FD some serious attention underhood. The drivetrain is going to be pulled for a variety of work, so I want to take the opportunity to really revitalize the engine & bay as it's the weakest part of the car visually at this point. I wanted to gather some ideas, examples, and if at all possible, ballpark costs on what you all have done to restore the look of your bays.
Currently, mine has the following issues I'd like to address:
- The bay paint is more pink than red...so repaint
- Dried out rubber relay covers
- Evidence of oxidation on metal here and there (TB, UIM, alternator, etc)
- Yellowed plastic tanks
- Rusty and/or oxidized bolt heads
I have one of the tanks new and will be ordering the other, but I understand that the rubber relay covers (circled in below pic) are no longer available (?). If so, does anyone have any leads on generic replacements?
My plan for most of the metal items are as follows - refinish or just replace alternator, and powdercoat as many items as possible silver (intake manifold namely) or black (misc. brackets). Has anyone just sent all their pieces of to be coated and been happy with the durability/finish over time? I understand the TB can't be powdercoated without (finicky) dissassembly due to plastic pieces being part of its construction - any tips on how best to refinish? Spray with high heat silver paint?
For anyone that undertook refinishing bolts - I've heard of having them "tumbled" to clean them up, and then re-plated in bulk - looking for tips on this too.
Lastly, for anyone who has repainted their bay - any ballpark costs you can share? The car will be at a shop for all the mechanical work, so I'm sure there'll be some added hours of labor to remove brackets/wiring/etc. - can the brake hard lines be left in place and covered? Steps taken for prep would be much appreciated.
So I just did mine about 4 months ago, I bought my car without a powertrain. so I am restoring it from the ground up. I just finished installing the engine (brand new one from Mazda) a few weeks ago, have been dealing with issues that have delayed the project but at least it is moving forward now.
Back to your question, when I took mine in, it had to get the paint completely stripped out and back to bare metal (you can see how bad it was in the picture). I also didn't remove any of the items you see in the picture, I left it for the shop to take care of. I chose a "flatish" black color, because it makes the polished parts pop against it. Now I still have a whole lot of cleaning and finishing to do, so don't mind the mess/dirtiness of the engine bay, but that is what mine looks like. it ran me about $1200 but your engine bay is nowhere near the disaster mine was, so I doubt that it would run that much for you. Those rubber caps shouldn't be too hard to be made, I'd have to do a bit of looking but I think you'd find a shop that can re-create those.
Your bay is a pretty dang good one to being with so you shouldn't have to do too much. hope it goes well and let me know if you have any other questions
I just polished what parts I could and for the bolts I just found an industrial hardware supply store like Marshall’s and bought new fasteners. Most of the bolts are M6 of different lengths. As for the faded paint, I rattle canned most of the exposed areas that are easy to get to and followed up with clear, but it’s far from perfect. Eventually it’d be nice to tuck all the wires and relay boxes when I get the engine pulled, but all in due time I guess.
IIRC the early cars had an issue with paint fading prematurely from the factory. I think it resulted in a lot of dealer re-sprays that didn't include the engine bay. My car suffers from the same issue. I had the engine out several years ago and regret that I didn't address it at the time. Since then I've tried different products on the bay paint in an attempt to mitigate the color difference. It's far from being 100% but the best (and easiest) results came from this relatively cheap stuff they used to hawk on annoying TV ads https://www.walmart.com/search/?quer...finish&veh=sem
If you're not set on originality I went to the local hardware store and bought stainless metric hex fasteners and washers to replace various painted and oxidized fasteners.
Maybe one of the guys that bought their cars new can chime in, but I think the rubber relay covers/saddles always sagged a bit...even when new. I did take the army green relay rack, brake boost hard line and other misc. bits and had them powder-coated. Personally I wouldn't coat the UIM or TB. I polished mine back when it was trendy, but it's decidedly harder to maintain afterward. Not sure I would do that again but it does match my IC and hard pipes.
i'm redoing a T2 at the moment, and its red. i should really post pics, but for the engine bay paint, all i've done is scrub it and wax it, and it looks great.
the relays you'll have to make the call, the relays with cover are available, they are just expensive.
for the rusty bolts you can either buy new, or have them re-plated. the Gold and Dark Green/Black plated stuff is a Zinc Dichromate. if you search there is probably someplace local that does it, pricing seems pretty reasonable. i would go look at samples first, and make sure it matches. my local places pricing menu is stupid, so i have no idea of the cost, but plating is $55, and they have cleaning for $45. they don't say per unit, so i have no clue if that is $55 a bolt, pound, gallon or what. i'd paste a link but in addition to the stupid pricing, i haven't seen a sample.
the Grey/Silver bolts i think are a Cadmium plating, which is hard to find, as its nasty stuff, its better for rust protection, and Mazda seems to only use it on chassis parts under the car. probably best to just buy these from Mazda as needed.
for the oxidized aluminum, blasting with walnut shells, or something non sandy will actually bring you back to the original finish. cleaning and painting, is an option, polishing is an option, powder coat is an option. its been my experience that powder coat can be fragile, paint has trouble with chemicals (like fuel, and brake cleaner). polishing needs maintenance.
also if you're changing colors, i've learned that you cannot go wrong if you have everything else OEM. my friend built a car once, and it was a CYM, and he had the engine bay painted yellow, and powder coated all the brackets and stuff yellow, and used yellow vacuum lines, and it looked terrible. he ended up repainting the engine bay black, and restoring everything except the intake manifolds to stock. so it ended up stock with yellow intakes, and that looked great. so you want to start with OEM
Excellent info guys, thanks very much for the replies - I'll be sitting down with the shop I take it to and seeing what can come of this, with your input at hand
If you're up for a bit of aesthetic advice, keep the number of colors in the engine bay to no more than 3 and make sure that the colors go well with (compliment) each other. So you know there are aluminum and black bits and pieces. Have a 3rd color like red or white. Not green or blue with your VR exterior paint. Take a look at the thread on engine bays and see what others have done. Simplicity, clean routing of wires and hoses and few colors goes a long way to making it look good.
That's the plan, the three will be red, silver, and black. Red for the bay and R1 strut bar that I have waiting to go on, silver for the UIM/TB, AST, etc. and black for most of the hoses and brackets. There'll be some polished metal in the mix as well (Greddy SMIC, TB elbow, IC piping, Banzai pulleys & Efini y-pipe crossover tube) but I think that'll fit well enough and be close-enough to the silver all things considered.
to freshen up the relay covers i used 'back to black' tire shine spray. worked pretty good. results are 8-10. still way better than 25 years of drying out. also i think the back to black may help soften the rubber also. i used it on all my hoses and black plastic.
In my case, the paint didn't have anything to grip to so now everytime I ding an area in my engine compartment the paint flakes right off, and since it was down to bare metal, if I don't go in and respray it it's going to rust
It's not really necessary to strip the paint in the bay unless there's already an adhesion problem, too much paint (very unlikely)...or corrosion. And If you do, you need to use a self-etching primer over the bare metal before laying down another color coat. Stripper also gets into a lot of areas you don't want it, and requires careful clean-up afterward. Every time I've HAD to use stripper on something I try to remove the involved part.
12-08-17, 06:01 PM
