How To: Paint your Brake Calipers.

[joe7987]

(Credit for this does not belong to me. It was moved here quite a long time ago)

At one time or another, we all get tired of our boring looking calipers. We see painted calipers, but we dont really want to risk f***ing anything on our cars up. We also dont really want to take everything off when we paint it. Well in this article, I will show you an easy way to do up your calipers using tools you already have

Items needed:
- Jack stands (or for the ghetto folk, cinder blocks)
- Jack
- Tire Iron
- Newspaper, and plastic bags
- Degreaser or other cleaning solvent (make sure its non flammable)
- Bristle brush of some sort
- High Heat Paint

Ok, so I decided to paint my cailpers. I wanted them to match my yellow 'H' Emblems, so I picked up some Dupli-Color Engine Enamel Ceramic 500 degree Daytona Yellow DE164s Paint at my local autozone. High heat paint is important because your brakes get hot. You can get paint rated higher heat than this, but I couldnt find any that was yellow so I went with this.

Project car: 1991 Honda Civic LX Sedan

Step 1: Jack up car, remove tires, put on jackstand, and repeat with other side of car (for those of you who have 4 wheel disk brakes, do em in whatever order suits you)



My car only has front disks so I just jacked up the front


Step 2: Clean your calipers as good as you can. I chose to use some degreser we had, which probably didnt do the best job, but I could not think of anything harsher than this that wasnt flammable


This looks good, doesent it?


Step 3: Cover all the s*** you do not want to paint, do not just spray away because the end product will look like crap and you will hate it. Dont worry if a little paint gets on the rotor, it will come off once you brake.




Step 4: Do a couple of nice LIGHT coats, using an hour between applications (what I did). Dont try to do it all at one time, because you will have runs and it will look like crap.


I did about 4 Coats in the end, once you are satisfied and the paint is DRY remove all the bags and newspaper and s*** and admire your work




time to throw the VX rims back on


And there you have it folks, one quality job.

Final note: Do not paint your drum brakes as it looks pretty ricey, and usually flakes off (if you like it do it, but I wouldnt)

[charles_00Civic]

Cant you ltake em off??

[imracin101]

yes but u'll have to bleed the brake lne afterwards..why paint them?

[lotz6996]

you can always paint the drums black so they dont look rusty.

[pguff]

yeh I painted my drums black, and plan on painting my calipers red when changing pads and rotors

[lotz6996]

Originally Posted by imracin101

yes but u'll have to bleed the brake lne afterwards..why paint them?

just get a vinyl hose from your local hardware store, and an old plastic bottle, drill a hole in the top of the bottle and insert tubing, slip tubing over bleed valve, and no mess.

[aeraiva]

Great write-up. New to the site and plan on visiting the how-to section frequently.

I drive a black 97 Civic HX now and have smoked headlights with an 8000k HID kit. The tail lights aren't smoked yet but they will be shortly. With this, I'm deciding to paint my calipers black... but was also thinking of painting the drums black. I don't know if that black-on-black will look well but I don't like the rust on the drums.

I'm slowly installing blue-tipped led toggle switches to various blue accent lighting in the car so I suppose my cars secondary "accessory" color is blue. Not sure I would want the calipers to be blue though since I'm going for a dark look.

Again, love the write-up and all the others on here! Will be looking at posting a few of my own in the very near future. Keep up the good work!

Thumbs Up! :)