Story and photography by Colin Date

If you’re content with a clean lookingdaily driver, or if you display your carat shows but leave the hood shut,there’s probably no need for you totackle this project. After all, who seesthe underside of your hood? However,if you’re proud of all that effort you’veput into detailing out your engine bay,you’ll want to pay attention to this YouCan Do It. The underside of this car’s hood was

super nasty, never having beentouched in over four decades. With thehood removed, now was the time toget down and dirty, and restore theunderside to its factory freshappearance.

UNDER HOOD RESTORATION

Photo #1: With the top side of thehood completely masked off, we setthe hood against a fence. We used acouple of wood blocks to set the hoodon— keeping it off the actual ground.

Here we’re using a wire scrub brush toremove grease, grime, overspray, andvarious other debris that makes theunderside of the hood look downrightterrible.

Photo #2: A small section had somesemi-serious rust happening. Nothingto get too excited about, but leftunchecked, over time this could haveled to perforation. On a freshly-paintedhood, that would have, well, sucked.

Some light wire-brushing, followed upwith a couple of coats of POR-15, and allwas right once again. In case youhaven’t heard, POR-15 is a rust preven-tative paint that stops rust in its tracks.A must on projects like these.

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• Cannot Be Shipped By AirStop rust cold and restore rusty sur-

faces by painting on POR-15®. It leaves

a beautiful finish that is flexible, but

won’t crack, chip or peel. Cannot be

shipped by air.

88-0270-1 Semi-Gloss Black 49.99 qt.

88-0269-1 Gloss Black 49.99 qt.

88-3406-1 Silver 49.99 qt.

88-3404-1 Black 169.99 gl.

88-3405-1 Silver 169.99 gl.

Por-15® Rust Paint is available inBlack and Silver in quart or gallonthrough all Eckler companies.

POR-15®

RustPreventivePaint

32 March 2014 ChevyClassics

Photo #5: Here’s our hood, with aplastic sheet taped up behind it.We wanted to paint the hood, notour fence. At this stage, we took arag and some de-greaser andwiped everything down again. Asyou can see, the yellow tape ismasking off the hood’s vent slots.We also taped up the holes in theleading edge of the hood wherethe letters attach from the top side.

Photo #3: As a final cleaning prep,we took some 0 grade steel woolover the entire project.

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Photo #6: One can of Rust-oleum’sRusty Metal Primer provided a nicebase for our top coats.

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Photo #4: Before priming, weused a shop vac in the “blowing”mode, and blew off paint dust,steel wool debris, etc.

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Photo #8: Time for our top coats. The folks atEastwood Co. supplied us with 2 cans of theirUnderhood Black paint in aerosol format. Thefirst can sprayed out nicely, the second can,not so much. A bad spray tip was the culprit.Two 11 oz. cans turned out to be nowherenear enough paint either. So, we relied onour trusty favorite AeroPRO (#5933) semi-gloss acrylic enamel to finish the job.Eastwood’s Underhood Black (ignoring thebad spray nozzle part) is actually a pretty nicepaint and provides a smooth semi-satin finish.It took 3 cans of AeroPRO to finish the jobthough. Basically, we ended up usingEastwood’s paint as a primer.

Photo #9: The hood, painted. Final tally:One can of rust primer, 2 cans of EastwoodUnderhood Black, 3 cans of AeroPRO semi-gloss. And as you’ll note in the photo, weonly went light on the coats where thehood insulation is going. So, if you’replanning on doing this kind of job byyourself with “rattle cans”, make sure youpick up lots of paint—hoods are very largepieces of sheet metal!

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Photo #7: It took about an hour tocompletely dry. By the way, we’respraying in the early evening, ambienttemperature approximately 75F. Perfect.

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Photo #11: The individual sectionshave to be bent slightly to securethem into the hood’s individualrecesses. It’s an easy job, and the endresult looks great.

Photo #12: All done. To finish off, we’llremove that tape that was masking thehood’s vents, and paint in betweenthe vents using a small brush.

We’ve had our hood hinges profes-sionally restored too, so that hood isgoing to look fantastic when we bolt itback up!

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Photo #10: Here’s our new underhood insulation kit. This stuff isgreat! It’s an exact replacement partmade of flame resistant fiberglassmaterial, and it’s cut to fit our car’sunder hood cut-outs perfectly.

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Check out our Hood Insulation Saleon the inside back cover.

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