Rb20 Cam / Timing Covers

So this was how my motor and bay looked before it came from Japan, bone stock RB20DE with 64XXX km's.

Earlier this year (2015) I had some issues with charging among other maintenance things that will be covered in another post. But anyways while I had my motor torn apart doing my timing belt, tension, idler and water pump I had the perfect time to change the look of how my engine looked and a little tidying up. 

This is how the upper and lower timing covers looked when they came off the car. I was working at Vex Performance at the time so I had the the resources to thoroughly clean and sandblast them to make them look ballin'

And I then painted them this blue but when my brand new water pump failed and i needed to tear it apart to replace it again i went back to just the raw sandblasted look.

I also did my coil pack cover at this time.

________________________________________________________________________________

 So just to clarify, my cam covers i did all by hand and it took 6+ hours each to do. I had some pretty abrasive steel wool in the garage and was just trying to clean them with that and brake clean, as you can see in the photo below the left one looks gross and has some corrosion on it. I started to slowly make my way through the grime until i got to the point i went to far and it started to become shiny, I was like well damn, that would look kinda cool with my timing covers eh. So i took some 150 grit sand paper and used that to cut through it a bit quicker, following along with 400 and then some finer steel wool to get the final desired results below.

A little metal / aluminum polish and another good chunk of time polishing it by hand you can see the right valve cover has a deep dark metallic shine.

Cam covers bolted back on with new gaskets. 

Finally new parts arrived to re assemble my motor and changed the coppery coloured harmonic balancer and water pump pulley to silver and the clutch fan to black to match the black and silver theme.