Engine Detailling
I don't know about you but I've always loved the idea of a clean polished engine bay. My engine had always sat there looking oily and dirty surrounded by splashed dirty paintwork and dull hoses, I had to do something and here's how ...
Degreasing
The paintwork was all splashed with mud, oil and all sorts so it seemed necessary to clean the whole engine bay first off. I used an engine degreaser product, it comes in liquid form and you simply pour it into a suitable container and use a paintbrush to work it into the dirty areas. You must always take care to avoid the electrics and i usually cover the distributor first with a plastic bag. The degreaser liquid can be bought in spray form but i feel there is more control with the brush over where it ends up and working it in with the brush is the only way of really removing all the dirt. Once the whole engine bay has been done i usually leave it for 15 minutes or so to soak in and properly dissolve all the dirt and then rinse off with a sponge and clean water, you could use a pressure washer but again take care with the electrics. Once the water has run off you'll be amazed how much cleaner the whole thing looks, plastics and even the engine look much cleaner and surrounding paintwork will look better.
Paintwork
The next stage for me was to clean the paintwork in the engine bay properly. The engine can be polished or chromed but still won't look right if the engine bay itself is dirty. I used a cutting compound (T-cut) and polish to clean all the paintwork including down the back of the engine. Having removed the standard air-box in favour of a k&n induction kit there is quite a lot of visible paintwork down the back so once this was all clean there was a big difference already. I polished all the red paintwork i could see, the inner wings and the underside of the bonnet - an area a lot of people forget. Any areas that are scratched, chipped or rusted should be touched up.
Polishing
It is possible to have many items chromed at a price and it looks brilliant but i have found that many of the items in engine bays are alloy anyway and can be polished quite successfully. I started with the rocker cover. Once removed i used a set of buffing brushes attached to an electric drill. A set can be bought from most hardward stores and using different grades of brush and wax working down to finer ones you can achieve a chrome like finish. Take your time here because it is worth it and once done you'll only need very minor effort to maintain that shine. The alloy does dull down as it get's dirty but a metal polish paste on a rag will buff the shine back up again in no time. The inlet manifold was next and i'll be honest here - this took quite some time. Again it is worth it though, the reason it took a while is because there is a texture on the alloy, i wanted a mirror finish though so i first used wet and dry paper and sanded away until it was as smooth as possible, again using the buffing wheels i polished until i had the desired finish. I used exactly the same approach with the air-flow meter.
A slightly different approach with the alternator and engine mount was used. I removed both items and found that a circular wire brush, again in the drill would almost immediately give me a clean sparkling but textured finish in a matter of seconds, i kid you not, the alternator took no more than 5 minutes to clean, i then replaced both the alternator and engine mounts. The alternator recieved a red band around the middle using a touch up brush and red paint. Anything that is too pitted or corroded could of course be removed for spraying or brush painting.
I have moved the power steering reservoir to the other side of the engine bay due to the k&n induction kit so i created a bracket cover from polished stainless steel sheet cut using tin snips and bent to shape in a vice and a battery top cover using the same methods, both add nicely to the effect. If you want to spend a bit more cash there are some really nice alloy battery covers available with louvres in the top.
Hoses
The only remaining thing to do was sort the hoses out. I bought an over-braid kit for the engine bay which gives a variety of sizes of over-braid and coloured anodized alloy clamp covers . This kit wasn't cheap and to be honest is purely cosmetic, i covered all the hoses that were visible and easily removed, the overbraid simply slides over the top and the clamp covers clip over the existing worm (jubilee) clamps. You can get 'proper' braided hosing but some of the hoses on the my car i noticed are moulded and differ in thickness along their lengths, replacing these would take some effort. All the hoses that i didn't cover with the over-braid i sprayed with silicon spray for protection and to make them shiny and black like new. Even if you don't go for braided hoses you can still achieve a good effect just by replacing old corroded hose clamps with shiny new ones and treating hoses with silicon. If money is no object you could also buy colour coded silicon hoses. These hoses look superb and are available as complete kits for many cars. The high pressure Samco silicon hoses will also help performance on turbo applications because they will allow higher boost pressures.
The result
Well the result i hope you agree looks good. When people look into highly detailed polished engine bays they shake their heads in disbelief like they are looking at a 500 bhp monster engine but of course in many cases it's just cosmetics. It did take quite a few hours but to maintain it now is fairly easy. It does require a little bit more work to keep clean but the hard work is basically done and dusted.
Pictures