Paint valve covers peels off?

[Cenobyte]

For a while now I have been having problems with the paint (powdercoating?) on the valve covers of my 1993 ZR-1. It looks like the paint has gone dark, but most of all soft. When the engine is warm, you can scrape it off with your finger nails.

At first I thought it was some kind of protective stuff a previous owner sprayed on it, but now I fear it's the paint itself that has gone soft, since beneath it, it looks like bare aluminum. Because it's so soft, the paint looks very bad and is damaged all over the place...

Do any of you people ever experienced this problem? What can be done to get the engine back to it's beautiful original condition? Removing the valve covers and "sanding" them down with plastic grain sanding process? I'm afraid to ruin my covers, also since it seems they can't be bought without the rest of the cilinder heads...

[jonszr1]

lingenfelter sells a good quality paint in spray cans .it matches very well . other avenue is powdercoating which is alot more cost wise

[Cenobyte]

With powder coating, I'm afraid the covers will not fit proberly anymore, since the layer is much thicker than paint.

To paint them, it'll be necessary to remove the valve covers, I guess?

[Aurora40]

Originally Posted by Cenobyte

With powder coating, I'm afraid the covers will not fit proberly anymore, since the layer is much thicker than paint.

To paint them, it'll be necessary to remove the valve covers, I guess?

You would only have the top side powder coated. So it shouldn't affect the fit.

If you painted them, you'd probably simply want to mask them off well. Though removing them would make painting easier (but removing them isn't necessarily easy).

Is there something else going on? Are the cam covers getting excessively hot?

[tomtom72]

I have to ask the same Q as Bob about excessive heat? I've had an antifreeze spill and that didn't do anything but stain the OE paint on my cam covers.

I suppose that something could be wrong with the factory paint....it wasn't that great to start with. Oh, the LPE stuff works great and matches very well to the existing paint.

[Cenobyte]

Originally Posted by Aurora40

You would only have the top side powder coated. So it shouldn't affect the fit.

No, you're right. However, it would be more difficult to avoid messing up the black letters?

If you painted them, you'd probably simply want to mask them off well. Though removing them would make painting easier (but removing them isn't necessarily easy).

I think that would be a hard job, with all the pipes and stuff over it

I talked about it with a shop owner that services a couple of ZR-1's and (while he doesn't have a clue what's going on with the paint) he also prefers to invest some more time in removing the valve covers (or at least freeing them up completely by removing plaenum) than spending more time covering everything up to avoid spraying over something else. By removing the plaenum, he can also paint it too to avoid ending up with different colors (it actually are different colors now, since the covers are much darker). I may just choose another color than the standard light gray

Is there something else going on? Are the cam covers getting excessively hot?

I never experienced overheating in the time I own the car (7 years now) and the car has never been raced during that time. I did have defective bobines (distributor coils?) when I bought the car and the engines was completely disassembled for that problem (because the then current owner did not know what the problem was). Strange thing is that the paint stays kind of soft. Even with the engine cold, it's easy to damage the paint. When it's warm (not even hot, but about 70 degrees celsius), you can easily damage the stuff with a finger nail.

BTW: here is my pride and joy we're talking about

[cuisinartvette]

Send them off to Jeffvette for powdercoating and never worry about them again. Dont worry, he can get the letters looking right again, too.

He should throw up some pics of his work, youll dig it.

[Aurora40]

Originally Posted by cuisinartvette

Send them off to Jeffvette for powdercoating

You saw he's in the Netherlands, right?

[Cenobyte]

Originally Posted by Aurora40

You saw he's in the Netherlands, right?

Yeah, that's part of the problem: the people with knowledge about an LT-5 are very hard to find over here.

[Z Factor]

Originally Posted by Cenobyte

Yeah, that's part of the problem: the people with knowledge about an LT-5 are very hard to find over here.

Hello and welcome to the forum.

Though you are in the Netherlands, you might still consider the extra cost of shipping worth it if you would like to have the job done right by a reputable vendor here in the United States.