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So I had a couple extra valve covers lying around and with my Z being in the shop for body work since November I was hunting for a project. I decided I was going to shave and paint my valve cover like the japanese rising sun flag. I've never attempted anything like this before, so I'm going to add in my mistakes so hopefully other people can learn from them. Despite that, I think it turned out pretty cool. Old valve cover: There was a big hole in it covered up by some JB weld and it was in generally crappy condition. Sanding and cleaning: The filth of ages was on there, but nothing some engine degreaser and a lot of elbow grease can't get off. I used a belt sander and 36 grit sandpaper to grind off the lettering. You can see that this revealed some casting defects. I used an xacto knife to cut out the paper thin aluminum. I then taped a shop towel to it and flipped it over and used the xacto knife as a mini putty knife to apply the JB weld to the inside of the valve cover. After it set I ripped off the towel and sanded down the excess. I had to fill in a depression by the oil cap with more JB weld to make it smooth. The other areas also got some extra JB weld to help get them smooth. Then I sanded it down all over with 120 grit, then 240 grit and was ready for primer. Primed. After priming I noticed tiny pin holes in the JB weld. I sanded these down, cleaned out the pinholes, and smeared a tiny bit of JB weld in there as filler. It really makes you appreciate Bondo... Every time you apply JB weld you have to wait 24 hours for it to cure. Sanding and re-filling with JB Weld: The primer was pretty smooth and it filled in most of the imperfections on the metal. I sanded it again with some 1000 grit (I didn't have anything between 1000 and 240) and painted it white. I then sanded the white down with 1000 grit. This looked cool, but was probably a waste of time and if I was doing this again I wouldn't bother. Before: After: Now the fun part! The original Japanese rising sun has 16 rays, but I thought that they would look too thin, so I decided to go with 12. First I traced a circle on the cover with pencil. This scratched the paint and I couldn't erase it. I ended up having to repaint the cover white and sand it again to get rid of the marks. Next I tried a dry erase marker. I taped it to the end of a compass and traced my circle. I then used a green marker (the red was busy being taped to the compass) to measure tic marks along the circle. I took the circumference of the circle and divided it by 24, then measured with a ruler. This is not quite exact, but it won't matter since I was about to majorly distort the rays of the sun to curve around the bulges in the valve cover. I used 3M blue painter's tape to mask off the white areas. I first cut the tape into little rectangles then laid them along the tic marks in vees. Then I traced over the circle again with my compass. Then I lifted the tape up and cut along the line I'd just drawn. My girlfriend helped a lot with this part and the rest of the taping too. All masked off: Now I sprayed it with red paint. This was another mistake... The red paint bled under parts of the tape onto the white. Worse still was that the red paint turns out to be mostly transparent, so I could see the green tic marks through it. The only thing I could think of was to just put on more coats of red paint. This kind of worked, but made big ridges against the masking tape. If I was going to do this again, I would use a red marker for the tic marks, and first spray another coat of white paint so that it would "seal" the tape and prevent the red from leaking underneath it. I touched up the runs with a tiny paintbrush and used the same spraypaint I'd sprayed in a little puddle on some masking tape so the color would match. At this point it was never going to be perfect, and trying to sand the ridges smooth made the red paint smear onto the white. I just called it a day and sprayed on 4 coats of clear. I could do it better if I did it again, but I think it looks pretty good. FYI I used VHT high temp paint for primer, white, red, and clear. If I had to do this again, I would sand it down and cut out the casting defects. Then have it sandblasted and the holes welded up. This would have saved me about a week of work.
