I didn’t want to lose any momentum I’d built up last week, so although today was a bit of a hectic day being back at work after a week off, I still wanted to get a bit of work done on the car when I got home. It was a nice sunny evening, so it wasn’t hard to motivate myself to open the garage door and work on the car in the sun.

My side pipes should’ve been finished being coated today and shipped. I haven’t gotten any shipping information, but I was told last week they’d ship today. I definitely want to get them installed on the car before starting the engine. One thing I’d meant to do last week and never got to was to paint or otherwise coat the exhaust hangers. Because it can take 48 hours for paint to cure thoroughly, I wanted to get that done today.

I started off by setting up my folding ladder on my driveway. I did this before to paint some parts and it ended up working out well. There were cut up coat hangers used to hang the parts. (There are both the exhaust hangers and the hood hinge parts hanging there — there are only two pieces of steel for the hangers.)

I started off using some Marine Clean degreaser, which I had from doing a lot of POR-15 painting on my 911 six or seven years ago. The POR process involves degreasing, then using a Metal-Ready etching compound which basically coats the part with a rough zinc coating that POR (and paint) can stick to. I dug out the Metal-Ready and wetted down the parts with it for fifteen minutes. As it dries, it chemically bonds a zinc coating to the metal.

Once dried, I then starting putting down a coat of enamel primer. I sprayed two coats of primer to get good coverage.

While waiting for coats to dry, I installed the vacuum hose between the Powerjection unit and the MAP sensor on the firewall. This hose is slightly undersized, at 5/32″, but I’ve had absolutely no luck finding 3/16″ hose for some reason. I put some leftover metal braid over it and ziptied the ends to hold it on.

Over the course of the next two hours I got two coats of primer and three of black enamel paint on the parts. I’d planned on putting a coat or two of clear enamel on top to protect the parts, but it was getting cooler and dark and had to let them sit.

Depending on when the pipes show up, I’ll either leave them like this or spray clear on them on Wednesday. I’m hoping by doing more coats and better prepping the parts, this paint will be more durable than the paint on some of the mounting brackets in the engine bay.

I also did some more cleaning in the garage. I think tomorrow I may wheel the car out of the garage so I can do a more thorough sweeping.