Car restoration Part 7 (Valve cover and engine) in May 2012

Since I bought the car I have cleaned the engine twice.
Now, with the engine compartment stripped down, it was the perfect time to clean the engine thoroughly.
Some dirt on wall surfaces did not come down even with engine degreaser, it had to be scrubbed off gently with a soft brush. After that the engine degreaser would work much better.

Cleaned engine bay.

After running many kilometers in past years the valve cover had typical spots where the paint became loose. I tried to fix it in 2010 with the HT red wrinkle paint, but the color shade was a little bit different than stock Honda, therefore I decided to repaint the whole valve cover.

Old valve cover paint.

There are many write ups on painting the valve cover. I did it basically in the same manner. Using the paint stripper and thinner I stripped down the old paint, degreased the surface, covered off the holes and sprayed it with the wrinkle red paint using several light coats. No primer applied. The procedure has been acquired in the following pictures.

The old paint stripped down.

The holes covered off.

The result after spraying. 

I did not bake the cover in oven. I just let it to dry on the sun. At that time it was a nice sunny day with temperature enough to do the job.
Bringing the letters back to shiny aluminium was pretty tedious job, but the sandpapers of various grit combined with water did the job just fine.

Finished valve cover.

On this occasion I replaced the valve cover gasket and the leaky oil sump gasket as well. The drain plugs have been also upgraded to magnetic plugs from Skunk2.

Oil sump gasket and magnetic drain plugs.

The finished engine bay with all auxiliary devices back to place looked like this:

Finished engine bay.