Thunderbolt Restoration

Thunderbolt Restoration Part 7 - 1003 Chopper continued

At last, the paint coats were dried and I got to reassemble this thing. Unfortunately, I have found that my painting advice from Rust-oleum was not very good, and my paint job is less than perfect. Specifically, Rust-oleum tech support told me that it was OK to use yellow stops-rust enamel over their Professional grey primer. Well, this didn't work well at all, and the yellow scratches off a bit too easily for my tastes. For the rest of the parts I paint, I will be sticking with the stops-rust clean metal white primer.

I also noticed that almost no spray paint sticks well to aluminum. Apparently there is a type of Zinc Chromate primer than works great on aluminum, but it's so nasty and carcinogenic/mutagenic/teratogenic that it's not sold in many states, and not safe to work with at home even if it was.

This is an inside look at the solenoid mechanism. The solenoids themselves are like small power transformers with a center core that slides in and out.

Here I am making new covers for the solenoid housing. This is a piece of sheet metal I just cut out. I traced the shape of the solenoid housing openings on to 26 gauge sheet metal, and then cut out the shapes leaving a 1/2" flap on each side to fold over. I used offset metal snips and a sheet metal bending tool. After bending with the bending tool, I hammered each fold to a crisper edge over a small anvil.
Boy, it sure would have been nice to have one of those small combo brake and shear tools for this project (putting this item on wish list for future). I would have been able to make more neat and precise covers with a proper shear and bending brake.

Here are the finished covers. They turned out better than I expected for having been made with such crude tools. You may notice the shininess of the metal. It is galvanized sheet metal, all I could find in this gauge at the hardware store. I am going to have to sand off the zinc before I paint them, or bathe these in HCl to dissolve the zinc off. Painting over zinc with spray paint would not be any more successful than painting aluminum, so I need to get down to bare steel first.