Lifter galley paint

-
Oil gets dirty from carbon from combustion, and getting scraped into the oil from the piston rings. If you change it real frequently it doesnt turn black as fast, but still will over time if you leave it in there long enough. Paint or no paint, doesnt matter. I used to have a 1988 daytona shelby. I dumped oil and filter every 2,000 miles to protect the turbos bearings. It was already turning brown. I certainly wouldent be letting any gas station attendant touch my engine or pop the hood for anything.
 
Last edited:
This stuff is supposed to be amazing, Mechanic In A Can, Yahooooo!!!

61EJgL+d3eL._AC_SL1000_.jpg
 
I used to work with a guy who was adamant that non-detergent motor oil was the best. His evidence? He would proudly show anyone how he could pull the dipstick and the oil looked as good as the day he put it in.

He was a mechanical engineer, so you can imagine my difficulty when I tried to explain to him that the oil is supposed to get 'dirty' so it carries with it the combustion byproduct when you change the oil, rather than leaving it in the engine, and he couldn't grasp that.
 
What I can tell u is that if u use race gas in ur bracket motor the oil stays cleaner a lot longer. I mixed the race gas with premium unleaded and the oil turned grey faster. Even the headers run lots cleaner with race gas. Kim
 
I've never thought the claims that painting the inside of an engine made a significant difference in drain back, hot oil and gravity do fine. However, keep in mind that engine blocks are sand cast, and there is a fair amount of sand bonded with the as-cast surface of the iron. Painting helps ensure that no stray casting sand comes loose down the road. I've always used Rustoleum red oxide primer, never had any come loose, and probably gained very little by doing so. It's mechanical masturbation. Make me feel good when I do it, but probably won't amount to a hill of beans when all is said and done.
 
I sandblasted this cast iron intake clean, and filled the cleaned out pits with JB weld. I used Akzo Noble 10P42-NF on it. This is that fluid resistant epoxy primer. MEK and paint stripper wont touch it. Only way to get it off is to grind it off. A friend of mine has a super flow engine dyno he bought used. Previous owner never drained it after use and all the water passages has corrosion. We sandblasted and coated all the water passages in it with this stuff. 6 years later he took it apart to inspect it. Everything was still coated and corrosion free. Not so sure I would use it on an engine block unless I could bead blast all the surfaces that I would coat with it. I figure it's good enough for the water passages.

20181218_103453.jpg


20181219_132325.jpg


20181219_193159.jpg
 
Last edited:
That’s a good idea with the underside of the intake Matt! Those are always nasty and oil stained when you remove them. Think I’ll do that to my intake.

That's exactly why I did mine too plus to insulate the intake a bit more since my fuel runs under my intake to the fuel rails, but also added heat tape on the top some and bottom side of the runners.
 
Regardless of the naysayer's comments, it is a beautiful sight when you tear down a motor for rebuild or maintenance of some kind and find the interior clean as a whistle.


Not to me. It’s a sign someone had more time than money. I’ve seen hand polished blocks that took hours and hour and hours of grinding and polishing and not one of them made more power.

If you want more oil control, run a crank scraper. You can’t do a thing with paint of anything else in the lifter valley to make more power.

It’s a feel good exercise.
 
Oh I guess I’m just being flippantly cocky and arrogant due to reading too many other posts by some of the various arrogant and cocky posters on this forum!! LOL!! Actually I also recalled reading of painting things in the old Mopar Performance book and I consider that book the Gospel so I recant my previous blasphemy!! But I won’t be painting even though it does look nice

View attachment 1715689161


So how do you qualify and quantify that doing all that makes power? How did the author verify his claims?

I can tell you a circle track customer did all that paint work, and he did it in the crank case too, and was all giddy with his effort. It went on the dyno and his 383 did exactly what we expected.

He had a filter blow off (cheap assed filter...I forget what it was) of fail and it kicked a rod off and killed the block.

He wanted me to paint all that crap because he was too busy. I passed.

When it went back on the dyno, it made the exact same power. And at the track the laps times were identical. He was bummed that all that effort did nothing.
 
So how do you qualify and quantify that doing all that makes power? How did the author verify his claims?

I can tell you a circle track customer did all that paint work, and he did it in the crank case too, and was all giddy with his effort. It went on the dyno and his 383 did exactly what we expected.

He had a filter blow off (cheap assed filter...I forget what it was) of fail and it kicked a rod off and killed the block.

He wanted me to paint all that crap because he was too busy. I passed.

When it went back on the dyno, it made the exact same power. And at the track the laps times were identical. He was bummed that all that effort did nothing.
That is above my pay grade as some would say. On this topic I have a book or two, and at my level all I can do is use my common sense and decide the merits. Might be wrong might be.... heck how about Teflon coating as mentioned earlier, but on everything? Including the crank throws, the rods....just crazy thinking I know!
 
After 30 or 40 years, I think any stray sand will have been long gone, or staying where it's stuck.

Painting the innards of a block is an answer to a problem that doesn't exist.
 
There is no reason an internally painted motor would have cleaner looking oil. None.
I'm gonna spar with you on this quote....In the Marines, your weapon was kept cleaner than your dick. We would spend just about every minute of down time on field ops sleeping or cleaning our weapons and shooting the ****. We'd go through Q-tips like nothing, 10-20 per cleaning session. We would get those 16's sterile and then we'd lube them up with CLP and stow them or move on. Next day or 2, we'd break then out of the armory and start all over again. First few Q-tips would be slate gray...WTH? The CLP would leach the carbon out of the parkarizing or the base metal itself. Not saying motor oil would do this from the iron blocks but CLP was basically detergent oil. Burnt hydrocarbons and soot in the oil make it black, probably not a whole lot from the exposed metals in the block. Bypass oil filters (toilet paper roll filter in a low pressure feed) would turn black fast and the oil would still be pretty darn clean.
 
Oil gets dirty due to combustion byproducts. Not the metal. I suppose for the first few miles 'some' coloration might come from the block/heads but that's a short-lived situation. The 'dirty' color you see in oil, or most any liquid, has to come from particles* of something. There's no way a block or heads is gonna lose that many particles to color oil for very long.

Toilet paper filters are another mistake of years gone by. The oil does stay very clean....but it was well proven that aside from being restrictive, the filtration was too fine and would strip the oil of many of the additives the makers put in.

*As a side note, one of my favorite factoids....something most people don't realize and don't want to know....is that all smells are particulate in nature. All of them.
 
That is above my pay grade as some would say. On this topic I have a book or two, and at my level all I can do is use my common sense and decide the merits. Might be wrong might be.... heck how about Teflon coating as mentioned earlier, but on everything? Including the crank throws, the rods....just crazy thinking I know!


Coating or micro polishing a crank probably has some merit. The crank surface feet per minute has to be astronomical so anything that keeps oil from sticking to it would be beneficial.

The oil drain back theory through the valley make less sense. Getting the oil past the crank and rod and to the pan is much more difficult than getting it down the valley walls.
 
they paint the insides of most heavy duty diesel engines and heads I never saw any signs of flaking or discoloring of the paint / most mopar engines used in circle track need extra help getting oil back to the pump ,the oil gets trapped in the heads and wont drain back. some put extra drain lines in the valve covers or drill thru the head and back to the pan. going around short tracks with steep banking traps oil in the v covers ,and you have unexpected rod failure
 
they paint the insides of most heavy duty diesel engines and heads I never saw any signs of flaking or discoloring of the paint / most mopar engines used in circle track need extra help getting oil back to the pump ,the oil gets trapped in the heads and wont drain back. some put extra drain lines in the valve covers or drill thru the head and back to the pan. going around short tracks with steep banking traps oil in the v covers ,and you have unexpected rod failure
You're talking race engines. Although he didn't say, I believe the OP has a stock type 340.
 
The race head issue, like my W7 heads, is exacerbated by the different shape of the heads. You pretty much need external lines, unlike a stock head. If you need paint to get the oil to return, you have bigger problems than paint is gonna fix.

The external lines are actually a blessing in disguise. They allow you to return oil directly to the pan without going down the lifter valley. But regardless, they are not so much of a 'trick' as a requirement.
 
-
Back
Top