Valve Cover Polishing
For the longest time I’ve always admired a mirror like shine that comes from a valve cover. I have seen many on ebay and every so often one will pop-up. The only problem is that it is quite a large item to ship from overseas and I often hear that people needs to spend time maintaining the shine.
I’ve also seen many chromed valve covers. Chrome looks great but it’s almost unnatural and too shiny in a 240z engine bay. I want it to shine like anything but not break the bank. Chroming an item like a valve cover could be fairly expensive, I’m guessing $300-$400 not bad but my engine build budget has already been blown out of the water.
For me it’s also about personal satisfaction, I get great satisfaction out of doing a job myself especially polishing something to a high luster. I know it will be time consuming but I’ve decided to try and buff up one of my spare valve covers as a test case. If successful I’ll probably sell the test case valve cover since it’s a 280zx L28 style one with the bold looking NISSAN font on it.
I personally prefer the original valve cover style on the early 240z and 260z’s. The reason being that I find it more true to the car’s heritage. The early ones often read Datsun OHC (Overhead Camshaft) and the earlier series one 240z ones read Datsun 2400CC (For the engine’s displacement).
So I used Google to search for any valve cover polishing tutorials, at first I didn’t find much but after some persistence I managed to come across an article that was quite good. I later discovered that the author of the tutorial followed instructions by a guy doing by the name of Polisher. The author Steve Clark offers to send people an e-book giving them an insight into the polishing process for aluminium and other metals.
He was kind enough to send me a copy of the article which I admit I’ve only read half way. However so far it’s been really good. I’m going to attempt to polish my valve cover soon and provide a tutorial for the members on viczcar as well as any passers-by. Stay tuned for an update soon!
