I had a 365GT 2+2 arrive at my shop last week for some work. It’s a car I’ve known for over a dozen years, through three owners. The current owner has owned this car for about 8 years an it was time for a valve adjustment. The valve adjustment interval for these cars is about 6 thousand miles, which doesn’t seem like a lot of miles between major services, but with the 1000 miles these get driven on average it can be years between valve adjustments for most owners.

A lot more things have to be removed from a 365GT before I can remove the valve covers compared to a 250. There are power steering pumps, air pumps, and associated hoses, so I took several pictures to remind me how it all went back!

A lot of the emissions devices on this car have been disabled but they’re still installed. These devices were designed to pass stricter emission standards at the sake of performance and reliability, so we found taking them out of the loop of the tuning helped make these cars run better.

Another reason to do routine maintenance is to look around for other issues that need addressing. I was going to try to do this valve adjustment without removing the exhaust shields, but was glad I decided to remove them when I spotted an issue.

The right side engine mount was cracked and separated. Normally these have a heat shield protecting it from the heat of the headers, but it must have fallen off.

Pulling both motor mounts was no easy task while the engine was still in the car, but I managed to get both of them out. I didn’t photograph the process because I was covered in old grease and oil while trying to access nearly inaccessible nuts using modified wrenches and tools to complete the task. You’ll have to trust me when I say this job was a bear!

With the valve covers removed, we decided now was the time to strip and repaint the wrinkle finish with a fresh coat, but I first needed to mark and remove the throttle stands and things attached to the valve covers.

I took the parts that needed wrinkle painting down to my local powder coater, not for painting but stripping. I have found the locally available paint strippers have become environmentally friendly, and thus weak at actually stripping paint. The powder coaters however, have large tanks of acid and proper strippers that make fast work of these parts.

After a couple days, the parts were returned ready for my powder coating.