Hello Folks! We certainly did some other threads about this topic, not that long ago...
In my opinion, there are several ways to do it and the main subjet is if we are going to paint the engine bay with or without the engine on the bay.
As sharpstang72 was saying, he is not familiar with the spray gun use so i can assume that if you have a running car as is, you are not going to take the engine off to paint the bay either... I trully don´t know nothing about what products can you use because i´m from south america and here the story is far diferent, but what i can tell you is some practical tweaks i did on my car...
Well... here you can see a close to finish engine bay job... Not show quality but really decent and as close as stock original I can get by this days (with no money on new parts
)
I did all my work in there with the engine ON the car, i didn´t want to take it off because it has never been of the car before, so... Even if the results are not show quality, the process i did was kinda simple...
You have been well guided here on the steps and the materials to use... But you are not gonna sandblast the engine bay with everything on i suppose... I didn´t do that either....
What i did, before everything was to take all elements attached to the aprons off... My goal was to leave the working surfaces as empty as i could.. From radiator to wiring, I unmounted everything in order to get full access there...
Then, i used paint remover to go to bare metal... I did that in every apron, the cowl and the radiator support, as well as the visible parts of the shock towers... My car was never been involved in an accident so i was sure no body work was going to be needed...
After few hours of work mi engine bay looked metallic shiny, super clean and ready for some primer... I painted it with the spraygun but i know you can buy primers and paints in spraycans so, the job is the same...
First primer, then a little sanding to that primer and then the 40% PU semigloss black from PPG.. that´s what i did use in this bay... For me it is too shiny but it is what it is!! ejje
I went far from the engine bay per se and painted the hole components under the hood but that is not necesary really.. Looks good but again, it is a matter of tastes...
Well.. hope to be helpful somehow my friend!!