In my previous post on this subject, I finished with two sets of bead blasted side light armatures. The next stage was painting them. The inside was easy. Here I used VHT chrome paint, which can be applied without a primer. For the armature’s exterior I did use the more traditional approach. First a few layers of grey primer, followed by a few black layers. But than I found out that I had ran out of black paint. But I did have some clear lacquer and wheel silver left. After a few small test patches I opted for the clear lacquer. Gives a nice grey finish and it will be hidden from view anyway. Only other problem I encountered were the outside temperatures. Really too cold to paint parts. But storing all the parts at room temperature and then quickly taking them out one by one to paint, and using a hair dryer to keep them on temperature, worked fine. To make sure the paint would cure properly I put them in the living. Where a music stand can also be used for!
Quite pleased with the end result. And from a distant it even looks like the original finish (when new that is).
With the armatures painted I could switch my attention to the remaining parts, mostly the wiring. After a visual inspection I choose these parts, but after checking the wires with a multi meter I found half of them either were badly corroded inside, or had hidden cable breaks. The corrosion turned out to be a problem I found with more of the wires. Luckily I did have a few spares. And in the end I had a complete set of wires plus a few smaller parts.
And after cleaning everything thoroughly, cutting the new PVC cable sleeves to length and selecting the correct connectors it was time to reassemble everything.
And with the correct tools that wasn’t too difficult. Though always a bit of a fiddly job to crimp these connectors to the wires and fitting them to the connector blocks. But everything went fine. I even thought about fitting the rear gasket before fitting the connectors …
Another one of those many seemingly easy jobs finished. In this case, with everything added up, I think refurbishing these side lights took me somewhere around 16 hours (including a few trips to collect stuff and blasting, etcetera). No wonder this project is taking so long 😵
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