really important stuff

"The Devil is in the details."  This common phrase is often used to express the idea that overlooking some relatively minor thing can often compromise what might have otherwise been a successful plan.

Personally, I like details.  In my case, there could be an alternate interpretation, taken to mean that I am often sidetracked from what's important when I get distracted by some minor detail.

For example:  rocker covers.  I have been working on getting a set of rocker covers painted, even though I have a lot of other, more important things to do before I'm ready for rocker covers.

I wanted to re-use the stamped steel rocker covers that were on Bertha's engine.  I just like the look of the simple, stamped steel covers, and I don't know that I've ever seen aftermarket rocker covers that I was excited enough about them to make me want to shell out the money for them.

But, as long as I was blasting them clean and painting them, I wanted to do something a little bit special with the paint job.  In the early 1960s, it was standard practice for stock cars to have their engine's horsepower rating painted down each side of the hood.  I think that "410 HP" was a common number at the time.  Who knows how accurate these numbers actually were, but that was the practice at the time.  These were the days before sponsorships became sufficiently lucrative for a company to pay to have its name and logo across the whole hood.

By the mid-'60s, the power rating had been replaced by engine displacement.  NASCAR had imposed a limit of 430 cubic inches for Grand National cars, which is the series that grew into the modern Sprint Cup series.  Common displacements were the Dodge/Plymouth 426, the Ford/Mercury 427, or the Chevrolet 427.  I have seen photos of some Chevys that were labelled as 396s, some of the other GM makes ran some other displacements, and I think Ford qualified either their 428 or their 429 for competition for at least a little while, but most cars were 426s or 427s.

The displacement might be written as "427 C.I.D.," or "427 CU. IN.," and there may have been other variants, but those are the two that show up most commonly in photos I've seen.  Anyway, I just always thought it looked cool, and I had even considered several options for getting Matilda's displacement painted on her hood.  In the end, I decided that it would probably attract more attention than I would prefer, so I decided not to do that.

But, when I started thinking about how to paint the rocker covers, I had the idea that I could mimick the old hood lettering on the rocker covers.  In Matilda's case, her engine displacement is 414 cubic inches.  That comes from the original 402 cubic inches, plus a 0.060" overbore.

I had already blasted and cleaned the rocker covers, and painted them Chevy engine orange, so the next thing was to start going through all the MicroSoft Word fonts, to try out different letters and numbers, and different combinations of italics, bold, shadow, and so on.  In the end, I settled on "Impact" for the lettering, in italics, with a shadow.  The periods for "Impact" are square, though, and I wanted circles, so I used "Tw Cen MT Condensed Extra Bold" for the periods.  I mixed and matched font sizes to get everything in the proportions I wanted.  Then I printed out four copies, two for each rocker cover.  When I had the four copies, I carefully stacked them on top of each other with the edges aligned, and then cut all four of them at the same time with a razor blade:

 

The purpose was to cut them down to a size closer to the size of the rocker covers, but to keep all the edges aligned with each other, so that later I could line up the lettering with the shadow.

 

Next, I taped off the rocker cover in the area where I was going to be painting:

Then I took one printout and taped it in place, over the masking tape:

 

You can't see it very well in that photo, but once I had a printout taped in place, I took a pen and traced its four corners on to the masking tape.  These marks would allow me to line up the next printout, when I was ready to do the lettering.

 

My original idea was to trace over the lettering with a ballpoint pen.  I thought if I pressed hard enough, it would leave an impression in the tape, and I could go back and cut through the impression with a razor blade.  As it turned out, I couldn't see the impression well enough, so I ended up using the razor blade to cut the tape right through the paper.  Then I removed what was left of the paper and peeled up the unwanted sections of masking tape:

 

That looked like a pretty good setup, so next I masked off the rest of the rocker cover with paper.  I usually like to use junkmail advertisements for that, but I had just taken the recycling out, so I used some packing paper from a shipment of parts that I'd received:

After paint, I waited several days before removing the masking to check the result:

It came out pretty good.  Notice that I was careful not to remove the tape that had my alignment marks for the next printout.

The color of the shadow is called "cast iron," from VHT's high temperature engine paints.  My original plan was to have black lettering with a cast iron shadow, but when I saw how dark the cast iron color came out, I was afraid that black lettering would just blend into the shadow.  The more I thought about it, I realized there would already be a lot of black in the engine bay, so I decided that maybe white lettering would stand out better, anyway.

Another printout was taped in place, using those marks to place it correctly, then the lettering and numbers were cut out with a razor, and the whole cover got masked again:

I wanted to make sure not to leave orange gaps between the lettering and the shadow, so I tried to trim back slivers of tape until I could just barely see the edge of the shadow.  Then, I sprayed the lettering in white.

Several days later, I removed the masking:

All in all, I think it came out pretty good.  It took me a little while to adjust to the look of the white lettering, but it's really grown on me.

So, this has been a little bit of a distraction from other jobs that need attention, but on the other hand, sooner or later I will need rocker covers, and now that they are painted, they will be ready.

Although, just for the record ... I haven't actually checked that the stock rocker covers will fit over the modified valvetrain.  But, if they don't ... I don't know ... wall art?