Painting Calipers

**GarySS396** · 02-17-2011, 10:17 AM

Is there and easy way to paint my front calipers on my 99 Z28? I really don't want to remove them and have to rebleed my brakes. Cleaning them prior to painting them might not be fun either

Any help would be appreciated!

**pajeff02** · 02-17-2011, 10:47 AM

Absolutely. I painted the calipers on our car with Eastwood's Spray Gray and they have held up really well. Start by removing the wheel and hosing things down with brake cleaner. Use a wire brush to remove any deposits or gunk and then unbolt the caliper from the bracket. Never let the caliper hang from the brake hose -- use a coat hanger or piece of wire to suspend it.

Once the caliper is out of the way, you can unbolt the caliper bracket from the hub and then thoroughly clean them both again. The bracket is painted off the car, so you can figure that out for yourself. The caliper will need to be masked off for painting. I found that the cap from a can of spray paint fits the pistons almost perfectly. I simply used a pair of scissors to contour the cap to fit the caliper.

Mask off your wheel well, wheel hub, rotor, brake bleeder, hose and such before painting. It is also a good idea to clean and re-lube the brake slider pins with synthetic caliper grease while you have everything apart. If the backs of the brake pads are in poor shape, you can simply clean them and shoot them with some black spray bomb. Same goes with the rotor hats -- only I utilized POR-15 for them as it is highly durable. Here are the results on our car:

Before:

After:

**c5z28** · 02-17-2011, 10:47 AM

Tape everything off that you don't want to get hit with the brush or the spray. Use the high temp stuff or look forward to doing it again. Well if you really only wanted to do it once you would get them powder coated.