Radiator fan motor restoration. Giving our Lucas units new life.

Today we finished restoration of the radiator fan motors. Early Dino's had Lucas fan motors with magnesium fan blades. The blades will be covered in a future installment so today we turn our attention to the motors themselves.

The first step was disassembly and determination of the correct finishes. A little research took care of that for us.

The correct finishes for the Lucas motors are as follows:

Main Body: Hammer tone silver paint
End Cap: Raw cast aluminum
Fasteners: Clear zinc plating

Here are a few points of note:

1. Main body was dis-assembled, sand blasted and painted using Tremclad Hammertone Rust Paint in silver and it is a dead on match for original. The product page for this is:

http://www.rustoleum.ca/CBGProduct.asp?pid=19

The paint was baked in an oven to get it extra hard. Otherwise it would be needed to wait about a week for it to otherwise harden well.

We considered using hammertone powdercoat but after reviewing some colour chips we saw that the finish was too coarse compared to original. The spray can offered a perfect match.

2. The end cap was walnut blasted at a distance to avoid any pebbling of the aluminum. Once cleaned with some WD40 and ultra fine steel wool, the result is a part that looks freshly cast despite being 40 years old. Note that this part gets no paint of any kind.

3. All of the fasteners were stripped and clear zinc plated. As a tip, during re-assembly a little bit of grease was put under the head of the bolt to prevent tearing the paint below it. We could have added a washer there but that would not have been original.

Below are some before and after along with some side by side photos. They should tell the tale. We are pretty pleased with the results.