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Painting the Engine
Green Envy
water pump
Another part I ordered early on was this remanufactured water pump from Earlpart. These are exchange units, so I sent them my old one. The green paint they applied was not quite the same as what I was using on the rest of the engine, so I resprayed it when I painted the rest of the engine.
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Austin green vs moss motors green
Since I am striving to restore this car to factory original appearance, I wanted the engine to be the proper color. Ray Dawes at ACCC was nice enough to send me a sample of original Austin Green which is shown on the right. Unfortunately, he cannot ship paint or chemicals overseas. I had been told that Moss Motors had a green engine paint that was real close. A sample of that paint is on the left. Although the ACCC sample looks a little darker in the photo, it is virtually impossible to tell the difference between the two in real life.
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it's green alright
So I used it. More investigation of photos of original cars showed that the oil filler cap, and thermostat cover where natural color as is the water shutoff valve for the heater. Heater-delete cars simply had a plug here which was painted with the engine. I also got used hardware and a new oil filter from ACCC. I painted the mounting brackets engine color before installing them. A lot of owners have converted their engines from this original configuration to a more modern, spin on filter conversion. In my quest to return to factory original, I opted to go with the original design - and to replace an extremely ugly remote oil filter system that had been installed on the inner fender of my car.
The top of the valve cover has a copper colored plate containing patent numbers which was also left in its natural state. Obviously this plate was installed at the factory after the valve cover was painted. Another interesting note - early Austin chassis' were painted black, then the engine was installed. Later models, around 1949 and later I think, had the chassis and engine painted at the same time and everything was Austin Green. This change took place when Austin moved to to another assembly plant which had a large paint booth that the engine and chassis rolled through. |