The engine and the whole engine bay of course have to look perfect. Therefor I'm going to polish all aluminium (engine) parts that are in sight when the hood opens, except for parts that have too complicated surfaces. Those parts will probably be painted. Before you decide to polish yourself, you have to realise there's a tremendous amount of time involved. Of course you could just take the parts to a company that will do the polishing for you, but out of own experience I know that if you do it yourself, it will be done much better. High quality sandpaper is an absolute must, because lower-quality papers will get you nowhere.

Here you see two coolant inlets. The left one is stock, the right one has been polished. In order to get this result, I went through the following steps: dry-sanding with grid 80 to smoothen the surface, then increasingly fine paper in the steps 120, 220, 320 and 500. After this, wet-sanding with grid 1000, 1500 and finally 2500. Finally the real polishing can begin. With a good drill and a polishing disc in combination with polishing paste, the result as seen in the picture can be achieved.

These are thermostat housings with sensors. The left one is untouched and looks like you'd expect after being neglected for 14 years. The right one has been sanded up to grid 220. This is still fairly coarse and you can still see the sanding grooves. Even so, it already looks much better. There was quite some rough casting flash on this housing, so I filed it away with small metal files.

This is the assembled thermostat housing. If you look carefully, you'll see the weld running over the bottom of the left housing. Because I filed it away, it was much easier to reach when sanding its surface. For the larger open areas I use a cork sanding block wrapped in sanding paper. Whenever the areas become harder to reach with the block, I use a sanding rubber. And for really small areas I just use sanding paper, folded multiple times.

The upper part of the intake manifold can be screwed off, and is ideal for polishing. I've just recently started on this so there's much left to do. The smoothing of the surface with grid 80 was the most time consuming operation. Because this part has fairly large, flat areas I mostly used a sanding block. These areas are very easy to do once the surface is smooth.

These parts are located on the intake manifold as well, and they're quite visible in the engine bay. I haven't started on these parts yet, but as soon as I'm finished with the others, I will. The power steering pump, alternator, starter and distributor will be done as well.

Polished thermostat housing with brand new thermostat and gaskets.

Polished distributor with brand new OEM distributor and rotor.

Polished valve cover.