Coat polished alluminum valve covers?

Rick,

My experience-

Polish the valve covers. It is the best look, IMHO, but will show wear over time. Prepare to pull them (pretty easy with valve covers) and polish every 3-5 years, per personal taste.

Intake manifold. I had mine, a used piece, cleaned and CermaKromed here at CAPS 3-5 years back. Still looks great, easy to clean. Polishing has more bling to start with, but will lose shine over the years, and all the nicks and crannies love to collect crap and the coating holds up to this MUCH better than chrome will.

Larry

Larry's right on all points. On my black car I have uncoated FI and everything else uncoated, and it shines much better than clear coat on top when comparing to ones I have seen clear coated. Clear coat gives a very nice satin clear appearance though. However, without the coat, you have to polish and polish every so often like Larry says, and for me that means by hand on all the parts, very tedious if you have lots of places to polish that are hard to get to. If you don't have a bad back now, you will later. I have often come out of my engine bay with numb legs from sitting in there for hours. So, there are plus and minus depending what you want or how much pain you want to endure.

I'm not posting to argue whether or not bare polished aluminum looks better than coated aluminum. I'm just writing to make you aware there is clear powder coat, and there is a powder coat called shiny silver which has the appearance of polished aluminum. Either one will yellow a bit with age when applied to an intake manifold, either due to heat or exposure to gasoline, but in all other applications its just as durable and good looking as it is used anywhere else in an automotive application. There are also candy powder coat colors, and candy blue powder coat looks just like blue anodizing.

-G

quote:

exposure to gasoline,

That reminds me, while I have not seen gasoline affect the CermaKrome, I was advised that carb cleaner on it is a NO NO.

Larry