Lately I've been rebuilding engines for various project vehicles. But today I took a little break from that and did something completely unnecessary for a change of pace.
For the turbo engine one of several thermal management techniques will be the use of ceramic coating on the exhaust manifold, turbo housing, intake manifold (with runners), fuel rail, and the coolant return pipe (for starters). I have a ceramic coating product that can be done without a oven to cure it. It is referred to as a "air cure" product, because exposure to the moisture in the air causes the curing reaction rather than heat. The preparation requires a freshly sandblasted and cleaned surface. And the product is applied with a small detail gun or even airbrush (depending on the size of objects to be coated). Therefore I can do this at my shop.
I collected the parts to be coated, made sure all other work on them had been completed, disassembled everything and began the sandblasting process. Only to discover my blast cabinet is in need of some servicing. So this will be deferred to another day. But in the process I noticed the intake manifold had a number of poor looking areas; battle scars, poor casting, unneeded bosses, etc. I had already drilled and tapped all of the holes for the aftermarket EFI fittings, and plugged the unnecessary ones. But cosmetically it was in need of some sprucing up.
One change was to remove all of the casting on one end of the plenum for the cold start valve and other attachments. Cutting and grinding all of it off and finishing the surface to hide it's prior existence. I also removed the "Fiat" logo on the top; this is a Uno Turbo manifold so it said "Fiat Turbo I.E." originally. I retained the Turbo IE portion and will add my custom logo in place of the Fiat one. The majority of the remaining work today was just cleaning things up. None of this was really necessary and has no functional effect (other than the coating, still to be done). And I had to fight the usual urge to go full custom on it.
I'll still need to blast it, along with the rest of the parts to be ceramic coated. But here is a little look at how I wasted an afternoon:
Modified logo. I'll highlight the lettering in red after the ceramic coating and my logo are added (at the red arrow)...
Removed cold start boss and other fixtures at the end of the plenum (blue arrow), only leaving one vacuum port...
More general clean up from another angle. As you can see in all of the pics I did not attempt to completely shave it or make it show quality. I've done that on other project cars, but this one is more about function than show...
There are three ports remaining, all 1/4" NPT threaded; one for the blow-off valve, one for the MAP sensor, and one for the aftermarket adjustable fuel pressure regulator. The blasting process will give it a uniform finish and the coating will make the surface look consistent. I'm using a "titanium" color ceramic to give a little contrast to the bright aluminum color that's going on the whole engine (head, block, major accessories). Brackets and mounts will be black and a few red accents added for a touch of bling. The runners and manifold have already been port matched and lightly ported to clean up the internal passages. But being a boosted engine it isn't worth doing a lot of big porting other than make things flow smoothly.
The exhaust manifold and turbo have already been through the same treatments and are ready for coating. The fuel rail was also trimmed (no longer using the stock FPR and fittings) and cleaned up. The weather here is finally getting bearable outside (just dropping into the 80's this week), so I'll be able to do some spraying of finishes on certain items. Tons of other work to be done and I move at a glacial pace.