After painting the M-38 back to the original OD green, the main thing that stood out as still being blue was the radiator.   I had thought about just painting over the blue paint, but I was not sure how many coats of paint were on there already and I worried about heat transfer with all those coats of paint.   

   Below are a few pics, you can see how blue the radiator was!

Blue and bent up... not so nice.
As you cant really scrub or brush on it, the only way to clean it off was to use some paint stripper.  The aerosol seemed like a good way to get the stripper quickly and easily into all radiator fins.

The can says to spray it on then let it work for a about 10 minutes before trying to scrape the paint off.  As I cant do much scraping, I let it sit then used a brass bristle brush to try to brush the fins.   As long as I went with the direction of the fins this seemed to work somewhat and did not bend them up.

I sprayed the striper on, waited 10-15 minutes to make sure it was really soaked in then brushed it a bit.   I then re-sprayed it again and repeated this cycle 3-4 times.

Here it is after a good rinse.  The stripper did a great job and took of almost all of the paint.   I now have no real worries about giving it a coat of radiator black.
The radiator with fresh paint.
No more blue radiator!

That was crazy!   There were colors of paint on the radiator that I have never seen before!   I had already flushed the radiator before I stripped the old paint off, but I went back and flushed the heater core and block, then filled it and did the chemical flush also and got a lot more silt and rust out.   

I got a bit confused during the chemical flush.   The instructions said you should fill the system with the flush chemical and water then run the engine until it was at normal operating temperature, which I did.   The top of the radiator was very hot, I was hardly able to put my hand on it.   When I turned it off and went to open the petcock at the bottom of the radiator to drain it I was being very careful as I expected the water to be quite hot.   It was actually only lukewarm, it would be a cool shower at best.   I thought this must be some mistake and closed the valve and started it back up for a minute.   The temp gauge was in the normal range, the heater core was hot.   I then put my hand in the air coming off the top of the radiator and it was warm, but the air coming off the lower part of the radiator was cool.   I was surprised that the radiator was efficient enough to cool the water this much, but I guess it must be!
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