I've been wanting to build automotive themed furniture for a long while now and finally got the opportunity.
I came across a local forum where a member had recently hot tanked block that he wasn't going to use anymore. Sounded like an excellent starting place for my venture- except that the thing was in rural CT. No matter, with Mark's baby girl's first birthday and Marco to the rescue, we drove out, loaded up that block, left the guy $20, and went on our way to crush some Yuengling with the New England Crew.
Marco and I carried this iron behemoth around back where it sat for a few days.
Since then Ive been working on it little by little and tweaking the design and gathering materials to make a classy table that every car nut should own. (at least before a woman says it has to go). In an effort to prevent my table from ever getting the boot, I'm doing the best job I can to make this project worthwhile. I always say- do it once, do it right.
Alright, on with the pictures!
Heres my 305 block. Very light surface rust from sitting under a tarp, but nothing gasoline, various wire brushes, and elbow grease can't fix! You can see how easily the rust comes off in the valley.
All cleaned up for the night. Minus the bores- still have some work to do there so as not to ruin/swirl the shiny finish. While scrubbing, I realized how much of a PITA it would've been to have started with a junk yard block like I wanted to. Getting rid of oil, gunk, and road grime would have sucked the big one and been extremely difficult.
Awwww, it rolled over so you could scratch her tummy! Actually, I got my grunt on and carried this b**** about 20 yards into the basement because my dolly and wheelbarrow had flat tires.
I bought some primer and paint today and started to tape off the cylinders. This is an extremely time consuming task. I tried a number of different approaches, but this worked best for me. Trial and error was probably about an hour and a half- mainly because I'm a perfectionist. Since I'm planning on having this piece for a long time, I want to be able to look at it and not see every last imperfection that I could have prevented by simply taking a little more time and paying a little more attention to detail. You can see that the second cylinder looks like crap with tape peeling off of the wall. I ended up masking off about 14 cylinders on an 8 cylinder engine.
All masked off. I still need to do the bottom, but I'll get there when I get there.
Today was 95% humidity and rainy so paint will have to wait for another day.
If you're wondering about color- I would have liked to go white because it would show so much detail, but I'd probably get bored with a white block. Blue would've been great, too- but thats associated with Ford. Since this is a GM block, I have to keep it Chevy redorange.
More to come!
