MISTERGadget and I decided to go ahead and polish the top of our intake plenums. I'd like to say thanks to QKSILVER and RobG for giving us the idea in the first place. Now for the pics...

BTW- The pics all have a line going through the left side because my camera is a bit messed up

 

 

 

More pics in the gallery...

 

I like the idea of only polishing the ridges.
Looking great

 

Looks nice. What did you have to do? Did you sand it or just hit it with the dremel. You must have sanded it when finished to smooth it. It looks nice.

Vinny

 

Looks great!! It is always a bit more work than you realize. While you are at it, go ahead and polish out the inside as well.

 

We hit it with the dremel first and then sanded with 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1500, and then 2000 grit. After that we polished it with mothers. Gadget rushed through his since hes a lazy guy. Haha.

 

Broke your lens?

 

so if i wanted to do some polishing like that, those are the steps i'd need to take? hit it with a dremel (like you did in the pic) and then sand it down??

wize

 

2 quick things:
You need to make sure that you spray the plenum with Quick Detailer or water so that you are wet sanding it and not embedding fragments into it, and you also need to use some 3M rubbing compound on it when you are done sanding. After that you need to use a felt wheel with the dremel along with metal polish. Gadget will fill in the blanks when he comes online later.

 

Once your plenum is off, if you're not going to do the inside of it, cover all the holes in it for lines etc.. with tape so you won't get any aluminum shavings into it. Once you've covered those, mask off the area around the ridges, so that you have a nice defined line between polished and the powdercoat, and gives some protection when usign the power tools so there won't be stray marks.

Start off using the dremel and the flap wheel to remove the powdercoating and grind that area smooth. Make sure to remove all the pits and leave it compltely smooth.



Once you're done with that, start wetsanding with 400 grit sandpaper until youve removed all the scratches from the flap wheel and only have the 400 grit scratchers. Continue wetsanding, making sure each you throughly sand with each grit, going from 400 to 600, then 800, 1000, 1500, and 2000, in that order. Wetsanding helps since the water suspends the particles and keeps you from rubbing them in as you sand. Here's Vinnie sanding. We used quick detailer instead of water for the wetsanding lol.



Once you're completed the sanding, the ridges look very smooth and almost polished.



tutorial continued on next post

 

Ance you've completed all the sanding, you take the final step to make it really shine. We used 3m rubbing compound with a felt polishing wheel on a dremel, and followed it with some eagle one metal polish.



Afterwards we pulled off the tape, cleaned up the adhesive residue with some wd40, cleaned up the plenum in general, and put it back on the truck. Hit it with a coat of wax to keep it real nice.

Afterwards we went crusing through coconut grove and south beach, making fun of ricers.



That's me in the gay orange shirt, if you're gonna go to south beach and the grove with all those greasy lowlifes you might as well try and fit in!

P.S. even though Vinnie looks like he's twenty he's actually a year younger than me lol

 

only polish the inside when you fix the oil problem LOL

 

just some more pictures from that day: