Painting the Exhaust

Got the first coat of paint on the exhaust.  I did a few thin coats every ten minutes or so.  The can says to then let it sit for a week before applying more coats (which I will probably do).

I also cleaned up some of the exhaust hanger and flange parts.  I let the rusty ones sit in a bath of Krud Kutter, which cleaned them up pretty well.

Boy are my arms tired

This is a not-so-great picture of what the main exhaust body looked like when I got it.  Lots of scratches, flakes, dirt, and rust.  My goal was to strip down to bare medal to get it ready for repainting.  I started by using some chemical stripper to get the majority of the paint off.

The chemical stripper worked pretty well as you can see above.  My plan was to use a couple of wire wheels on my Dremel to clean up the rest.

But it only took a matter of minutes for those little wire wheels to wear out.

I had definitely made some progress, but not as much as I'd hoped.  I was going to have to buy a whole bunch of those little wire wheels if I was going to keep going down that road.  Instead, I bought a couple of those spongy sanding blocks (a medium, and a coarse) and went at the rest by hand.

Two very tired arms later I ended up with this.  I'm pretty happy with how clean and shiny I was able to get it.  The dark spots are where rust had already pitted the medal quite a bit.  These pictures don't show it, but the section nearest the engine is severely pitted.  There are also some other dings and scratches that I couldn't quite sand out, but once painted I think the whole thing will look good.  Better than it did before anyways.  This isn't a show bike or anything.  The Krud Kutter did a pretty good job of eating the rust off the surface.  I would alternate the KK and sanding on the rusty bits until the rust was gone.  I am now declaring the exhaust ready for paint.

DW on the Exhaust

Parts of the exhaust pipe are pretty nasty looking.  I decided to remove the silencer end cap to see if I could clean it up a bit.  This is what it looked like before I started.

A stiff bristled brush and a sanding pad worked pretty well to take off the flaky rust and random dirt.  But I was really able to make some progress with the wire wheel on my Dremel.  The Krud Kutter is supposed to remove any remaining rust in preparation for paint (I haven't tried it yet).  My plan is to use gloss black on the frame and motor so I'm going with flat black on the exhaust for a bit of contrast.

The Dremel really did wonders.  Nice and clean and ready for paint.

Painted.  Looks pretty good if I do say so myself.  If I can replicate this on the rest of the exhaust it should look pretty sweet.  I plan on using some stripper to remove the majority of the paint from the exhaust body.  I'm pretty patient but using that little wire wheel to remove all the paint would take forever.

With that success on the end cap I couldn't help but do a little work on the rest of the exhaust.  The portion of the pipe nearest the motor looked like this.  Not good.

Again, I used the brush and pad to get the loose rust and dirt off.  Then spent a few minutes with the Dremel.  Big improvement.  But it began to flash rust almost instantly.  I guess that's where the Krud Kutter will come in.  Ideally I'll finish the rest of the exhaust this weekend.