Too shiny...

If you remember back, I bought a shiny billet aluminum power steering pulley for the Viper last November.

I didn't buy it because it was a shiny billet piece, but because the factory plastic one is known to fail and this one will not.  It is shiny though.  Too shiny.  As the only shiny thing in the engine compartment, it would have looked out of place.  So, I decided to paint it.  The first step is to get rid of the shiny.  The quickest way to do this is with a sandblaster.  I taped off the belt grooves, and into the blaster it went.

Then came the paint.  I got a new type of paint for an as of yet undisclosed project, and this seemed like a great test piece.  I'm using a product called Duracoat.   It's a two part epoxy paint that is reported to be incredibly durable, and is solvent and heat resistant to 500°F. It's actually made by Sherwin-Williams as an industrial coating, but it's only sold through them by the gallon. The folks at Duracoat repackage and relabel it in (much) smaller quantities. Though I wouldn't call life in a Viper's engine compartment "rough," it's a good place for a long term test. If the coating does fail, I'll just repaint it with something else. Once again, I taped off the belt groves and laid on the paint. Duracoat is made to be primerless, so I shot it straight onto the pulley and here's how it turned out: