Help!....Stuck on header color for fenderwell headers.

I have my MSD box hidden under the dash haha.
(It not only has to look good, but go fast as well. I will be at the dragstrip all summer.)


Scot

 

My firewall and inner fenders will be hugger orange so I painted the engine black so EVERYTHING under the hood isn't orange.

 

That's cool. I have my electronic module in the same place. My buddies hide their MSDs too.

 

If your talking 60's, your talking white headers and VHT was the only brand available for the most part. You can go a long way to make them last if you sand blast first and use mutiple thin coats followed by some sort of baking before they are istalled. We had a guy that worked for the bread sompany here in town that could sneak a set in now and then and run them through the oven on a empty bread rack. Other than that the most sucessful method was to hang the freshly painted header from the front of the flange and direct the neutral flame of a cuting torch up into the collector and let the heat rise and out the indiv individual tubes at the flange. curing them this way 2-3 times before installation would make the paint much more durable.

Frank

 

I don't think POR15 is rated for header temps. It will burn right off.

 

x2 on the heat curing. The paint will last much longer if this is done.

I like to prep them well, spray them in thin coats and then let them tack up a little. Then to cure them, I take them over and lean them up against the wood stove for a few hours.

Practical this time of year, not so much in the summer!!!

 

Another vote for white.

 

I wanted to do mine white, but I was told the white powder coating would not stand the high temperatures that the headers would see. So, I had a choice of black ,dark gray or silver( in gloss or flat on all). So, I decided to go with the flat silver. Even the silver is looking a little ratty today, but I thought about spraying them white with VHT Hi-Temp paint this spring and see what happens. Worse that can happen is it burns off.
Back in the seventies I'd keep a couple cans of VHT white at the shop at all times. I'd just give the headers a little blast when ever they started looking grungy.

 

Reminds me of a pair of '55 deliveries that used to cruise the Gardens in Seattle. the only way you could tell them apart was one had White fenderwell headers, and the other had chrome. I always liked the white ones better.
I had mine aluminum coated. kind of an ash color, more white looking than silver. nice thing about it was any dirt,grease, or oil would burn off and leave them clean again. never had to clean them.

 

Keep building cars like yours and you'll stay that way! LOL
White only look good for a short time, I went with silver.

 

silver vht ...or white like mine just gets dirty to fast

 

Or red!

 

vote white!!

 

Duh! White


Tim

 

In the back of hot rod and car craft in the mid 60's vht had white, silver, black, yellow, red, orange and blue. also Ronnie sox had red white and blue on his comet exhaust

 

Powder coaters told me they couldn't even powder coat headers because of the low temps used to cure powdercoating. It cures at 350-400 degrees, so every time you fire your engine the header coating will get soft again and all the crud will stick.
They told me i had to go with ceramic, so I just painted mine.

 

And I should not have said powder coated, but some "jet hot" type of coating. Sorry for the screw up.

 

This is correct.

Some folks even real racers not posers thought that they would draw more heat out if they were white. But they could be seen in black, and silver also. Powder blue became popular on the show rods by about the mid '60s if I recall and VHT by about '66 had expanded their color choices by about a ton, yellow and corral became pretty popular coors for awhile, yuk.

But black or white were pretty much you old standby colors. I always painted mine black as arule but the most of what you saw or would have remembered wpuld have been white, perhaps because it was more visual.

 

try some of the Eastwood paint, it works great. Use a foam brush to paint them and it lasts.
http://search.eastwood.com/search?asug=hi+temp&w=hi+temp+header+paint&p=Q&ts=custom