I've just started blueprinting and building a 16v engine for my Sprint.
I need to make some choices about how to dress the engine -- where to use paint and which colours, where to polish the aluminium, what other things to do to hide or otherwise make attractive some of the uglier ancilliaries.
Dark colours are out, as I want to be able to see in there, particulalry if I have any leaks or anything.
If my car was nearly any other colour -- black, blue, green, silver, white -- I would paint the block with an aluminium coloured paint, and the cam covers and the plenum/intake-runners red. But my car is red, so I think it would be a bit too much red in the engine bay. Better to have something contrasting.
I'm still thinking about painting the block red, then polishing the cam covers and plenum/runners.
I'd really like to see what other people have done to make their engines look good -- any boxer engines, though particularly injected 16v ones. I love that engine, but with all the ancilliaries sitting on top of it, it's hard to make it look as nice under the bonnet as an Alfa in-line-four twin-cam, or the Alfa V6.
