My POR15® Review
The job of doing the valve adjustment during the engine rebuild caught my daughter's attention the night before the installation so she wanted to get involved. There is no love of cars on her part, simply an ambitious opportunistic desire to earn some money for music CD's. She is very good with her hands and has an amazing eye for detail so I though the best thing for her was to try her hand at cleaning and painting some parts. We were using POR15® so I warned her not to get any POR15® on her hands because it says right on the can that there is no known solvent that will dissolve POR15® once it is dry. Purple Nitrile gloves were the correct apparel for such a job.
I did it Myself!With Tools and Instruction
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We cleaned and painted a lot of extra parts other than the engine with Metal-Ready® and POR15®. They were parts 
such as the air cleaner, converter cover, pulleys, cooling fan, alternator and power steering brackets. We made sure to save and refinish the small parts that get lost or discarded by a lot of backyard mechanics such as the spark plug wire clips behind the cylinder heads, along the oil pan and above the motor mounts as well as the spark plug heat guards. I took extra care not to get POR15® on any threads or gasket surfaces.
Sanding some of the parts to ready them for POR15® was a bit too much work and I quickly decided to get them hot tanked. I should have had them all glass beaded too because the hot tank left an invisible residue that revealed it's effect when we used the POR15®. We wound up with some tiny spots where the paint was rejected as if the bad spot and the paint were magnets with the same polarity. I would recommend glass beading or even sanding with a medium grade paper after hot tanking parts. This is the first time I have ever seen this happen though.
Past experience with POR15® has proven that it does not bond well to clean bare metal. It will go on fine but in a few months of exposure to the elements, heating and cooling, and it will start to peel. POR15® recommends using their sister product call "Metal-Ready" which is a rust
stripper that leaves a zinc phosphate coating on the part when rinsed off and dried after use. That was certainly evident by the white chalky coating left behind. You should paint the POR15® on 
immediately though, I made the mistake of leaving a few parts overnight and the parts had a course powdery feeling crystallization on them in the morning which we needed to sand off. I think the humidity in the air might have caused the crystalization of the coating. The picture of the fan and breather base above show the white coating.
Use POR15® on a small block chevy engine
Even the engine block, heads and intake got the POR15® treatment. There is nothing on the can to indicate it, but if you checkout the manufacturers website and snoop around you will find that
they lab tested it at 700 degrees for 10 hours with no breakdown. I was convinced this 
would be a wonderful engine treatment. The sales person told me that if I waited until the POR15® was almost dry, or just tacky, I should apply my engine enamel
immediately which causes the 2 paints to bond extremely well. If you wait until the POR15® is completely cured, the engine enamel will not bond properly. The old oil pan and oil filter canister were really rusted and the POR15® took care of them permanently. So far the end result seems to speak for itself.
If I had of known in advance that the POR15® brand of chevy orange engine enamel needed 4-6 days before you could start the engine, I would have used it instead of the engine enamel from the parts store. I'm sure it is a superior enamel. I just didn't have the time to wait 4-6 days, I needed to get the engine in and running. It may have even prevented the problem typical of chevy engines where the exhaust crossover gets so hot it discolors the engine enamel at that spot.
POR15® after 2 years of engine heat.
Most people might not have used POR15® on a small block chevy engine or any engine for that matter, but I put it to the test. Their website said it was good to 700 degrees, so I trusted POR15® with my engine paint job. Now 2 years later the engine color has not faded or peeled anywhere on the engine except where the exhaust crossover at the intake manifold goes under the carburator. Even there, the only paint that peeled was the orange engine enamel, the POR15® is still intact, although the black gloss is certainly gone. Next time I will buy the POR15® chevy orange engine enamel and put the orange down in one coat.
POR15® after 2 years on the air breather.
The POR15® on the air breather is still in excellent shape with no peeling. The gloss has faded however but that is minor. I used the same 2 coat technique I used on the engine, where I sprayed on another paint on top of the POR15®. The color of the sprayed on enamel is not affected by the underlying POR15®. Your definitely need the Metal-Ready® if you plan on using POR15 on bare, unrusted metal.
POR15 amd Metal-Reaady are registered trademarks/tradenames of POR15 inc.