Valve cover - new black wrinkle coating

And another task completed. Something I have never done before and was actually quite curious about it. 

Overtime the valve cover had lost quite a bit of paint and it gives the engine bay a poor look. In this picture I had removed already a lot of paint, mostly the separate inner plate cover:

So I ordered a spray can of black wrinkle paint (VHT SP201). Price € 33,14 including shipping costs.

Luckily I once had bought a cheap sand blasting tool with sand so I figured it would be easy to remove the remaing paint:

But I was wrong, despite some paint was blown off easily most of it was firm. So I ended up buying a can of paint remover. Which did set me back a € 20,-

This removed additional paint but still some parts did still had paint left so I ended up also using a copper brush and sandpaper

So once this was mostly removed I further cleaned it with Thinner (a new bottle bought for € 5,-)
I put 3x times a small coating of spray on it with a interval of 5-10 minutes in between. And afterwards used the heating gun to dry it. Shortly afterwards I used a scraper to remove the paint from the stripes and letters whilst the paint was still a bit soft. After that I simply used sandpaper to make it blank and shiny again.

See paint instructions here: https://youtu.be/oOe8Is8uBiM?si=ZtGY9I1NKKgiABE5

The full valve cover I simply replaced from my other car which had a good one and didn't require respraying. I bought that one a few years back new but didn't came with the inner plate cover. 

So time to have it removed, easy job. They used some sealing as well for the gasket. So that has been cleaned off as well. 

I had ordered a new rubber gasket as well. This costed € 20,85 including shipping.

As for this valve cover, previously there was oil in the sparkplug area. This was no longer present. As said, this was potentially due to a loose spark plug. I did not spot any cracks in the cover or whatsoever. In any case, the valve cover is now being swapped for another one.

So time to put everything back together. Throughout the week I had already cleaned the engine bay a little more since the paint contained quite a bit of dirt. Small section example:

But now with the upgraded valve cover it looks pretty well. Not perfect but good enough for me as it will not become a show car in any case. So total round this time costed about € 80,-