Last year I bought a 93 FLSTF with 17000 miles on her. I noticed the black wrinkle texture paint on the engine fins peeling, especially on the leading cylinder. I live in Southern California near the beach so I know about the salt air, but she gets a regular bath and is covered when I'm not riding. Any suggestions on how to restore it to original?

 

Here are a couple photos to show you what I mean.

 

They all do that. That's the drawback of the black paint. You could touch it up, or mask everything off and spray some new paint on it, polish the fins back with some fine sandpaper, etc.

 

They did that back then. Harley used black wrinkle paint to paint the engines, and mine did the same thing at around 5 years/50,000 miles. Starting in '96, the Moco began powder coating the engines instead of painting them. This was when they began milling the cooling fin edges instead of sanding them.

There's not much you can do except scrape/sand the loose paint and hit it with some new wrinkle paint. A cheap airbrush makes it easier to get in between the fins with less masking and paint runs.

I had my motor rebuilt by the Moco in '02, and they powdercoated it. I havent had so much as a chip since then (about 65,000 miles).

 

I just cleaned the cylinders on Bertha with degreaser really well, masked everything off, and shot the cylinders with some rattle-can 500 degree flat black BBQ grill paint (or maybe it was engine paint... another one of those things I can't remember!)

Seems to be hold up pretty well after 2 years. I didn't even sand the paint off of the outer edges of the fins because I like them all black anyway. Makes her look different. Easy to touch up, too...

 

That's good to know. Put in a pic if you can. Mine is a mess and I have had no desire to dremel away all the remaining paint. So if shooting over it works ok I will likely just follow that route. I'm not real meticulous about that kind of stuff anyway.

 

That's pretty much what I did to mine. It worked well, but eventually the paint would start to chip or peel somewhere else, so every couple of years I would have to spray some more paint.

 

Here's a couple of pic's of mine when I did the top end. One pic is the faded jug's, another shows the black fins and the other is sanded. I used satin finish engine paint and baked it on. Obviously, you cant put the whole bike in the oven, so, when I did the case, I used a space heater to bake it. If you do it on a weekend that you can ride, once its dry to the touch, I'd go for a ride to bake it on. There's better ways, but not everyone has the time or resources to tear it down to do it at will. So, this works well in the interum.

 

Thanks for all the replies guys. All good info...I think I'll go with the engine paint until the engine gets rebuilt, then it's powdercoat time!!!

 

Not that great of a pic... but you can see what it looks like.