I have a GTC at my shop that was painted where we kept the engine installed. No matter how well you wrap and engine up, painting car car will deposit dust everywhere. It manages to land on every surface, and sometimes sticks so deeply that it embeds deep into the surface. I’ve been trying my best to clean everything up, but the valve covers are another story.

You can imagine wrinkle paint can really trap dust and dirt, and the irony of cleaning this surface is sometimes the wrinkle paint will come off too! The wrinkle paint on this car was starting to fail, so we decided it was time to refinish them. There are some tricks to preserving the wrinkle paint, but I felt these were too far gone to save.

The first step after removing the valve covers was to apply paint stripper and try to remove the old wrinkle paint. The environmentally safe paint removers seem to take a few extra steps than the older more toxic stuff, but I guess the trade off is I might live a little longer!

The first pass of paint stripper and power washing revealed spots that will have to be stripped again, so it’s a process.

The chain covers get the same treatment.

The same problem happens here when a second round to paint stripping is needed to get all the old paint off.

One thing I will make sure I do is to apply wrinkle paint to the Ferrari logo on the valve covers. A pet peeve of mine is when I see cars that leave this lettering in bare aluminum. That’s not how they were finished when they left the factory, and you can see under the paint, the lettering is in the rough sand casting. When people leave the paint off, they usually sand this area smooth to let the letters stand out, ruining the original finish. I’m begging, please leave this well enough alone!

I try to do my wrinkle painting in batches to keep the smell and toxic paint stripper confined to a couple of days of work, so I had a second set 330 valve covers to do as well. I have several ways to apply heat to wrinkle paint as part of the wrinkling process, but when it’s nice and hot, there’s no better even heat than from the sun.