Painting headers?

YY1 said
Did you use the Por-15 primer?

Nope, the instructs indicate to apply directly to prepped metal, i.e. no dirt, rust, oil etc...

How long ago did you do this, and how are they holding up?
I just started the application on Monday so no first hand experience. A coupel of my old buds (yes..Chevy guys :smile:) have gotten a few years out of their headers/manifolds w/o significant rust or flaking.

dgc333 said
The high temp stuff from POR doesn't go on over rust like the POR15 rust paint. The metal needs to be rust free.

I used POR20 which is the aluminum colored coating and it is by far the best high temp coating I have used, it lasted for 3 years and 20k miles before starting to break down . Much much better than VHT.

The headers I coated were very rusty. I used Muriatic acid (fireplace cleaner) to dissolve the rust. Three applications with about 5 minutes wait and all the rust was gone. If you do this do it outside because the reaction gives off some strong fumes and do it in a place the dog or cat won't get at it.

Spot on, prepping the surface to be painted is key. I didn't know about the POR-20 until after I bought the POR-15 :banghead: , or I would probably have gone with it instead. Thanks for the real world feed back dgc333