to paint or not to paint

i have pretty much deciced to build a new F/C this winter, i may have to team up with a friend to afford it this time around thou

But what is the opinion of painting the chassis
yes ---no--- what reasons for either side
good bad
how hard to keep a "bare" chassis looking good

easier to put on than to take back off so i would like some feed back on this please
all my previous cars have been painted
sprayed or power coated

[ September 17, 2004, 08:01 PM: Message edited by: john348 ]

 

With paint on the chassis you cant see welds that crack in the heat affected zone,(the area within an 1/8 of the weld or so).also it is very heavy. LPS makes a great product for bare steel.It will only rust where you sweat on it!

 

Clear protects metal and you can see cracks.

 

Seemed like whenever we used to paint our chassis, inevitably we wanted to add or subtract something from the chassis after it was together which required welding.

Plus, I was a little anal about scratches on the frame and would be biting my tongue while the bellhousing went in and out every run.

No paint=no scratches...problem solved.

 

i have always painted my chassis.
the best way to have a great looking job that wont chip off is to have the chassis sand blasted and spray imron straight on the bare frame. no primer. if you scratch it you might scratch off the shiny paint but you cant scratch the paint off

 

Bo-shield T-9 is a great product to protect unpainted 4130. I think Aircraft spruce sells it. If you are ambitious you can scotch brite it down and rub on some cold gun bluing called oxfo-blue. This will take some effort but looks nice.Still needs maintanence. . Powder coat is out of the question. Any repairs/ updates or changes are a huge pain with paint and if you cant get it completely clean you will have contamination in your weld in the repair area. If you ever do your own welding you will never paint again..

 

I found I was more concerned about scratching the paint then making good runs with a painted chassis.

At least in a situation like ours where the car comes apart a lot, clutch is changed every run and we are constantly adding or subtracting stuff which requires welding based on rules changes or whatever, best advice would be...

Race car frames don't show very well, and show car frames don't race very well. Take your pick.

 

Randy how much weight does paint to a chassis add?

 

Freinds of ours sandblasted the paint off of their chassie a few years back and said it saved about 17lbs.

 

has any one ever used triple etch on the bare tubing before they use lps
just wondering out loud if this would be better than bare oiled tubing to keep from rusting

[ September 19, 2004, 11:26 PM: Message edited by: john348 ]

 

My chassis used to be painted, it had two different paint jobs on it and only changed four pounds when we blasted it to bare.

 

I helped on a Funny Car for awhile and we gun blued it ....it always looked good and any time the car came apart on the off weekends we rubbed it down ....I have been helping on SC and TD cars lately and we scraped all the powercoat off the SC car because it was scatched and we were looking for cracks..the TD car when we assembled it we wiped it down with brake clean and used flat black spray paint on it.. we can see any cracks that appear and when we scratch it which is all the time, we wipe the area down and touch the paint up with the can ... POwder coating is a pain to get off if you want to fix something at the track ..at least with the spray paint you can clean up an area and cover it up so rust does not have a chance to set in ..

 

QUESTION
now that i am not going to paint the pipes
what is the best way to prep and what should i use to clean/oil
do you just scotch brite with lps/wd40?
how often does it need scuffed and oiled
its keep it a heated building all the time so thru the winter does it need consant attention?

 

any good tricks to removing powder coat other than sand blast????

 

we have a place here that can blast it but they dont use sand they use plastic beads
doesnt hurt the metal
still can read the marking on the tubes after

 

Our friend used air craft stripper or some kind of acid. Said it worked pretty well.