Have you ever wondered why there are paint drips on a majority of the brackets and small parts on your GM classic?

Believe it or not, what GM did back then was to develop a really cheap and effective method to paint these parts as a subassembly operation near the assembly line.

What GM did was have a large tank of water, and they would pour about 1" of cheap black paint on top of the water. The parts came in raw steel, and they were dipped into the paint and hung up to dry on racks. The process was really neat, and the part dipped did not break thru to the water.

I saw this first hand at the GM plant in Framingham in 1972.

It works great - use Rustoleum enamel in the non spray can for best results.

On my Fremont built 70 442, I found drips on pulleys, brackets, and interior parts.

 

I remember someone here doing that and posting the pictures on the process.
I was amazed that this was actually doable!!

 

This has been written up in auto magazines from time to time. Restorers will duplicate the process with a bucket of water and a thin film of paint on top of the water.

 

so u just grab a bucket of water then pore the paint into it let it sit and seperate again so that the paint was on top of the water then dip in the parts?

do u have to dip it fast like in then out. or do u put it in slowly then pull out slowly?

 

Good thing this is a family site....... ---bil

 

A dysfunctional family maybe.
What family has one girl and hundreds of guys?
Some kind of bug??

I remember seeing things about how to do that dip painting technique in car magazines before the internet.
That swirly painting stuff that looks like those giant sausage balloons and bowling ***** is done the same way, multicolored psychedelic engine brackets would be really cool.... man.
I had a '70 GTO and every part under the hood was painted a different color of the rainbow by the hippie radio DJ who owned it before me.
Should of kept that car.

 

lol.

 

How could an alternator bracket i.e., not break through 1" of paint to hit the water?

 

I'm confused by this as well. It also seems to me that if you dipped a part in paint the paint would be much too thick/heavy on the part, and pool in depressions. There must be something missing in the description of how this was done.

 

That's exactly how it works. The whole point of this thread is that the factory paint on these parts looked like crap. If you want to do a true factory look, it WON'T be perfect. Yes the part breaks through into the water. When you pull it back out, the paint clings to the part. The water is used to avoid wasting a whole bucket full of paint, since you only need to have a thin layer of paint as you pull the part out.

 

The descriptions I've heard said they used the cheapest black enamel they could get. It about had to be oil-based to float on the water.

As an aside, all those claims by a couple of big-name restoration suppliers that they have the ONLY correct pre-1956 Oldsmobile Green engine paint, mixed per the factory formula...

Guys who worked the engine line back then dropped the bomb. The green engine paint came in 55-gallon drums marked "Dark Industrial Green" complete with MIL-spec number on them.

I always thought that green paint we had on everything in the powerplant looked familiar.

 

yup, that's exactly what happened. it makes it fun trying to strip all of those parts, too.