What color to paint engine compartment

My Comet is very early production in the 1972 run at KC. The underhood paint was body color originally.

 

Here is the car's door tag. Not terribly late, 02/71

 

Dittos on my 1972 as well.

 

I might add that my 71 Comet GT was Black with silver stripe. Maybe that was why it was gloss black under the hood. Don't know the answer.

 

All the cars I've seen with black engine compartments regardless of color have been semi gloss... The cars with body color have same paint as exterior, stands to reason the paint would be glossy whether it's red, green, black, whatever...

 

I agree. Sounds like Ronald's car wasn't black in the engine compartment....it was just "body color".

Under the black semi-gloss paint in my engine compartment on my 1970 Grabber was the Dark Aqua body color.

 

My '69.5 is the same way, you can see body color paint coming through where the factory black engine bay paint is wearing off.

 

Interesting. So the factory just painted the black over the body-color.

 

Yeah, from what I've seen. With the volume of cars they were building I'll bet it saved them a nice chunk of change to simply omit that step.

 

My yellow was under the semi-gloss black, too, but the yellow seemed to run-out just past the cowl brackets. When I removed my heater box, the nuts on the firewall were yellow underneath, suggesting that the heater box was installed before the black paint was applied. My black taillight panel was also painted over the yellow, and you can see where they masked-off the quarter extensions.