ZGrand

I bought some of the chrome FRPP cam covers from a forum member here and decided to install them today. (The stock cam covers looked really bad.) I was a little reticent to try it myself, since I'd read that an extra pair of hands to hold some of the wiring was particularly useful. A helper would have been nice, but the install went pretty smoothly without many hitches.

I was surprised to see that the new covers had fewer bolts than the stock ones. But everything looks fine so far -- no leaks that I can see.

But here's how my luck goes. After I finished up and reconnected all the things I had removed or unfastened, I went back over all the bolts to make sure they were tight. The 7mm bolts that hold the COP's down wouldn't go into their threaded holes smoothly. I attributed this to the chrome coating that got into the threads. I wanted to run a tap through them, but I didn't have one the right size. Anyway, the very last bolt I checked (the last cylinder near the firewall on the driver's side) was not tight, so I tried to tighten it. You guessed it --- it snapped. I had to drill out the broken bit of the bolt, which wasn't easy to do since it was so close to the firewall. It would have been easier to take the cam cover off, but I was tired and cold and didn't feel like it. I got it out, but the threads in the cam cover were no longer any good. I used a small bolt with a nut at the end to hold the COP in place. Doesn't match the others, but no one will ever notice.

They're hard to take pictures of, but here is the finished result. (I know I need a plenum cover -- its on the list.)

1 Alibi 2

Big improvement, looks good.
The stock cam covers make an engine look like crap, no matter how clean it was..

Rocket Ray

Pretty clean engine bay, how many miles do you have on that?

I took mine off and had them powder coated and they still look great. They tend to turn black over time if they aren't painted or coated.

ZGrand

Thanks. The car has about 53K miles on it. The engine bay wasn't quite that clean when I bought the car a few weeks ago -- I spent some time with Simple Green and various brushes and rags to knock most of the grime off.