Engine bay clean up and wire tucking

[Oldsman003]

Hello all, wanting to see what anyone has done to their bonnies or 88s. I will be tearing Ole faithful apart fairly soon for a replacement torque converter and at a current 344k miles she's getting a hearty transplant. New engine and trans and rack. I'm going to go the extra mile and make her really pop under the hood. What suggestions or options and success and difficulties have toy guys had with wire tucks? Nothing major just a clean up as I am cleaning and polishing ands painting quite a bit while she's out.

[Oldsman003]

Before my color change and bay update
[img[/img]

[Oldsman003]

And after, currently what it is now
[img[/img]

[MKMike]

Pretty spiffy!
I like the way it now looks.

[95naSTA]

Shaved/Tucked and still not quite finished. Too many things to list.

[Oldsman003]

I made the decision of going series 3 upper plenum. With the miles I put on the Ole girl I go through intakes like water. Lucky for me a friend of mine up north is sending me all the valve train upper and lower intake 40k timing set and a zzp throttle body adapter for $100 bucks + shipping. So I'm going to reroute some vacuum lines and clean up wires hide what I can and polish the plenum and brighten up my alternator bracket with the tensioner etc... I'm also upgrading to the late model alternator if I can but I believe heater hoses are routes different post 2000. But the engine is going black, heads aluminum silver. Black and red covers and a rough polish on the plenum. Mix in my polished speed daddy's I think she'll look great!

[Oldsman003]

Pretty spiffy!
I like the way it now looks.

Thank you, it's taken quite a bit of care to get it where is at now. With how much it gets driven this cat had been apart more times than a race car. I got it 10 years ago with 72k miles on it. Clock just turned 344k.

[MattStrike]

I don't really have a good picture that I can find of what my SSEi used to look like. And I don't really think anything I did can be described as remotely close to tucking the wires, but here's my engine bay shots:

Here is was



I've since changed a few things already, and planning on changing even more soon enough:

[95naSTA]

Here's some of the parts I polished. Some are installed and some will go on in the spring.

[Oldsman003]

I'm loving the polished master brake cylinder. I have a low mileage spare I might take some time on. I'm going to polish my a/c lines and dryer since I have low mileage extras that are going on with the swap. The alternator bracket, *shoot* man that's a lot of work. How'd you get it that far? I'm no fool when it comes to polishing and I know what it takes. And knowing the crevices and stuff on it I can tell you've got some time in it. I'm going to keep my black and red theme repaint the block black heads are going to go aluminum silver and trans will get brightened. Upper and lower I take will get cleaned and roughly polished and all brackets will get a fresh coat of black. I like oem factory + so I won't go crazy. But I like clean

[95naSTA]

Anything with a small radius I used a dremel with a blank shank and directionally wrapped strips of sand paper then eventually strips of cotton from an old t-*shoot* with polishing compound. That only works for small radius stuff though. Otherwise you'll dig into the aluminum. Otherwise it was hours of hand sanding. I dry sanded from 80/180 up to 1500 so I could see the roughness of the finish the whole time. Then mother's aluminum polish then zoop seal or whatever they're called now.

I think I had about 16-18 hours into the master cylinder. Longer for the throttle body and tensioner.

[Oldsman003]

[img][/img]

[img][/img]

[95naSTA]

If you haven't tried it, Stain Magic (www.stainmagic.us), does a really good job of cleaning up corrosion and discoloring on stainless. I've used it on my aftermarket exhaust on my Ducati and it ended up looking more or less brand new. Polishing would have been another step beyond this but it would have cut the work in half.
http://www.pontiacbonnevilleclub.com/fo ... ml#p420512

[Oldsman003]

Yeah those headers took up about 4hrs of time one night. Fennel with a flap wheel to cut through the b/so them all by hand after. 400, 800, 1500 then 2000 then a few different polishes to achieve what you see. It's going to blue out almost immediately but oh well