Exhaust Wrinkle Paint

A couple of years ago, on the way home from driving the 330 to Monterey, the RH coil died and the raw gas burning in the exhaust burned off most of the wrinkle paint.

Painting with wrinkle paint requires a heat source or a hot sunny day.  Since today was forecast to be in the mid 80s (a rarity in Seattle, particularly in mid-September), I decided to remove the exhaust and see what I could do about getting in painted.  Removing the exhaust was easier than I though it would be.  I took both sections off together, separating them from the collector pipe at the front.  I expected that joint to be a problem since it's been ~24 years since I had put the exhaust on the car, but that joint came apart fairly easily using a 2x4 and a hand sledge to drive the exhaust off the collector.  Once that was done, I spent quite a while with a wire wheel and wire brush removing the rust and flaking paint as best possible.

Rather surprising, the ANSA stickers were still on the cans.  Then I used a product called Rust-Mort (basically phosphoric acid) which converts rust into a stable compound to prepare the areas for painting.  This solves the problem of rust being left in pits and cracks which continues to work and eventually causes the paint to crack and flake.  I was surprised that the cans are aluminum coated.  Once this was done and everything was clean and dry, I went ahead with the wrinkle paint.  I had previously used Eastwood's paint, but I didn't plan ahead and didn't have enough to do this job.  I ended up buying Krylon wrinkle paint at my local auto parts store.  It wrinkles much faster than the Eastwood and worked well just in the sunlight.  The wrinkle is smoother though, but that's not an issue on the exhaust for me.  It only took about 15 minutes after the second thick coat for the wrinkling action to occur.  Here's what it looks like on a can with the other picture showing the whole exhaust suspended from saw horses to I could paint everything in one pass.

Now, the LH exhaust doesn't look as good, so I may pull it off and paint it too.

A couple of years later, since I was replacing the starter, I also decided to replace the collectors.  As I had to remove the collector from the LH side exhaust, it was pretty easy to drop it to clean up the rust and wrinkle paint the affected areas.  Here you can see the rusty areas with Rust-Mort (a rust converter product) on it.  Then the wrinkle paint before and after wrinkling.  It was a hot (for Seattle) day, in the low 80s, so I just let the wrinkle occur naturally in the hot sun.