Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference.
(AKA the minor details that drive us crazy)
The alternator on this 1987 Buick Grand National was powdercoated in the same gray/silver as the up and down intercooler pipes, by the previous owner.
It still looks great, albeit the center section, needs to be touched up, as it’s starting to rust.
A fresh coat of black paint in that area should do wonders for it.
Since we already have gloss black paint, this task only requires the time to perform it.
Which should only take less than an hour to do.
Will probably take longer to remove & reinstall than it will to tape it off and paint it!
(minus of course, waiting for the paint to dry)
After looking and thinking about it however, we decided instead of taking it completely off and painting it, perhaps it would easier and quicker to just use some touch up paint on it.
But with the little brush in the bottle, maybe not quicker.
Or perhaps just tape it off ON the car, and shoot it.
Which was exactly what we did.
2 minutes for taping, 1 minute to lay out newspaper surrounding the area (so no overspray), 2 minutes to paint, 5 minutes to dry (before we removed the tape & paper).
A 10 minute job.
Of course, the paint wasn’t completely dry, but that can finish up while we go run some other errands for the day.
We were looking for a little quick task to do today (amongst doing other things during the day), that’s why we opted for doing it the way we did.
Yes, we cheated and didn’t paint the bottom side of that ring (because no ones going to see it anyways).
We suggest if you’re going to tackle this issue on your own Turbo Buick, take it off, it’s probably easier and you’ll get the entire ring painted (which prevents future rust).
(sometime in the future we may go and redo this the right way, but it’s good enough for now)
Once we removed the masking tape and paper, the ring did look good.
But then we discovered how dirty the alternator fan blades were, and figured we’d address those too.
So we took some goo gone and wiped all those blades down, along with the accompanying attachment brackets.
(which took 20 minutes… so much for wanting to do a quick job…)
A powdercoated gloss black finish was discovered under the layer of crust that was on them!
We didn’t expect that on the alternator fan blades, so that was a pleasant surprise!
Now that section looks pretty good!
[we left some of the dirt on the blades in the photos so you can see the difference]
(of course, lots of areas under the hood need a good cleaning, and we’ll get to that soon!)
Another small task accomplished on this Gbody Regal.
Just a little more something done in our engine compartment cleanup series we’ve been doing over the last couple months.
.
.
