The last two days were pretty intense.  I took a vacation day Friday, and the contents of this post happened in two consecutive 13+ hour days at the shop.  After seeing the results - it was totally worth it!

I finally opened my can of bondo!!  For now I'm using Evercoat Rage Extreme.  It's amazing what a difference it makes using good putty with 3M sandpaper, it sands so easy and the results are that much better.  This is a transmission mounting bracket.

All that mud sands down to this - just enough to fill the low spots.

After a quick coat of high-build primer to fill the sanding scratches.

I needed to rotate the trans during paint, so I needed to mount the trans to my rotating engine stand.  I cut up some plywood to turn my transmission table into an engine block table.  Norm Abrams would be proud!

I spent all day Friday cleaning the cast iron block with wire wheels and sanding discs.  I'm pretty sure my entire body is magnetic now.  My contact lenses turned orange.

Back to the trans, I pushed it outside for some final cleaning.  It was a beautiful day Friday.

I cleaned a couple more random engine parts.  I intended to paint these too, but ran out of time.

I intend to replace the driveshaft flanges after paint, so I sawed the originals so they wouldn't block the flow of paint.

I did the same with the clutch arm.  The arm and seal are getting replaced, so I'm basically using the OEM parts as masking tape.

Woody put his Beetle up on the lift to get it ready for springtime cruising.  Everything looked better than he expected underneath, no loose bolts!

Gunner supervised from his perch.

I got everything cleaned up and masked.

I mounted the trans to the engine stand and masked it up.

I pushed everything over to the paint booth.  Spoiled fucking rotten.

Here is a closeup of the masking on the block.  I masked the mating surface so the visible areas are painted, but the precision mounting surfaces are still bare steel.  I did the edging with 1/8" 3M Fineline vinyl tape.

Here is a shot when it was still wet, before the paint turned flat.

I'm so happy with how well it turned out!  The gloss level turned out perfect, and the paint turned out better than I expected.  I couldn't be happier with the results.  It was worth every painful minute of sanding.

I really like this picture for some reason.

The block is still textured.  I'm happy with it, but it doesn't look nearly as good as the trans!

Next step: cylinder head.