I've been really busy the past couple weeks at work, but have had some time to work on the valve covers some more along with porting/polishing the throttle body.  The rest of my free time has been spent mainly reading and researching parts for engine reliability/performance mods.

Valve Covers

Here's what the valve cover looked like all painted up.  The filler for the coil mounting bosses shrunk when it cured - I thought the paint would cover it up more than it did, so I restripped it.  Good for a proof of concept though.

After I finally got everything back down and leveled, I used Lab Metal for the filler material - it's a high temp aluminum-based filler.  Dries really fast, but doesn't shrink and is heat resistant to 450 degrees.  Really the only stable filler solution for metal that I could find for high-temp applications.

Here it is applied to the other valve cover.

Using a die grinder is ok to rough the filler back down flush, but I prefer to hand sand it when it gets close.  The grinder seems to pull the filler out of the low spots and is difficult to finesse, I found myself re-filling it several times because of this.

Not a bad little tool - definitely marked under the "nice to have" column.  

After a couple rounds of filler and a hell of a lot of sanding finishing with 150 wet, I ended up with something like this:

Painted with a few coats of high temp engine enamel.  Used flat gray as a "primer" and a bright silver for the first color coat.

Compared to the first attempt prior to wrinkle black:

But here's the pair in their current state.  Still a lot of sanding to do on the driver's side valve cover, and I've got to figure out how I'm going to mask the other one for painting with the wrinkle black.  Currently exploring several options.

Also spent some time shaping the pcv contour

Intake / Cover Hardware

I also ordered some stainless hardware for the intake/valve covers to clean up the appearance a little bit.  I hope to eventually turn the heads on these to clean them up a bit more but here's the general concept:

Throttle Body Porting/Polishing

Tearing the throttle body apart.  You can see all of the rough edges / ridges that impede airflow in past the throttle plate.  From a normal view, the throttle plate itself is sheathed by a ridge in front of it.  My goal is to remove all of this.

Get out your favorite dremel attachment and get to work

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Prelim Polish

Came out pretty decent so far.  Going to continue sanding until all the scratches / low spots are out - I want the intake surface to be perfect (or as close as it can be).

Non-project related, I snapped this on my phone one night after work this week, surprised it captured the sky as well as it did.  One possible good thing about working late is that you get opportunities for shots like this.

Also, Happy (belated) Oktoberfest!!!!