I spent a afternoon last week researching paint for the calipers of the C5. My search landing me in a local auto parts store and I recognized a familiar name. Dupli Color Engine Enamel, I used this paint many times on valve covers, manifolds and even a exhaust. Its rated temperature is 500 degrees. What impressed me the most about this stuff is its ability to maintain its color over time and not burn off or blister. It was even available in Ford Blue, which is close to my Nassau Blue, maybe a little lighter but still a very good match. 

With paint in hand, it was time to stop by Home Depot and pick up some masking tape and a roll of this slick clear plastic material that comes with tape already along its edge. The roll is only about 5 inches long, but the clear plastic unfolds to about two feet. I stopped by my friend Gilbert Chans shop (R Sports) and he was nice enough to let me use his lift and his install bay. I do most of my mod work at his shop, some times in my garage but whenever lifting the C5 is needed, Gilbert always hooks me up.

Normally Gilbert sells the Folitec brush on caliper paint, but I found that it does not hold up under high heat situations and it runs around $30-40 dollars. Gilbert had some Folitec caliper cleaner laying around from a previous install so he let me use some of it to clean my calipers before painting.

Here we see what the stock front C5 calipers look like and also how I masked off the area surrounding the calipers to prevent over spray from getting on anything but the caliper

More prep work masking off the car, rotor and surrounding areas.  Spray paint has a tendency to fly everywhere, so always mask off everything you do not want paint to get on.

I am hard at work painting the caliper here.  I turned the wheel all the way to the opposite side of where I was working.  This gave me a better angle to get the rear of the caliper.  I masked off the brake lines and the surrounding area behind the rotor as well.

Here is the finished product.  I put on about 8 coats of paint and waited about 5 minutes between coats.  Make sure you do not put it on too heavy, or you risk the chance of getting runs in your paint.  Also make sure your calipers are very clean and degreased, otherwise you will end up with either dirt in your paint or some nasty fish eyes.  I let the paint dry for about 1/2 hour before putting the wheels back on.  After two hours, I went back and took some 400 grit wet/dry sand paper and wet sanded the corvette scripting.  This removed the blue paint from the letters leaving the nice silver finish for the corvette logo.  I chose to do this before the paint had completely hardened.  This allowed the paint to come off very easy, or maybe I should say peel off very easy.  Took me about 10 minutes to do both the front logos.

One more picture of the new resurrected corvette script and a picture of the paint that I used (just in case you want to run out and get some).  Not sure of all the available colors, but they do have a nice red that would look good on the Torch colored C5's.  

This whole process took only about two hours, with most of the time going into the prep, which is the most important part.

7/14/00

I spent a couple of hours yesterday finishing up the rear calipers.  Pretty much the same scenario as above, so I wont be posting too many comments, just the pictures.

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