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after making my own ghetto-fabulous intake (5$ ), ive been focussing on dressing up the engine first with basic coloring, stuff like that. ive always liked the DOHC valve cover designs, wide, two column look for the DOHC valve train. i look at my valve cover and kinda want the cover itself to stand out and look better (already painted the cover red, wanna move on...)

reading the DIY on making your own aluminum valve cover, you use the plastic stock one as a mold. my question is, could you use this method and make extensions to the valve cover so it looks more unique?

not sure if anyone is gettin this......

take a look at the K20 engines and their cover that says "DOHC i-VTEC", the cover is not part of the valve cover. the part with the acura emblem where the cams are, the DOHC i-VTEC cover is in front of that, sort of covering the top part of the exhaust headers. could i, using the DIY aluminum valve cover, make something similar to this? i just want a different looking valve cover that is a different shape and design to it.................

hard? expensive? worth it for the unique looks?

 
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Its crossed my mind to take a crack at it. If you had a CAD program and access to a CNC, you could machine your own out of a block of aluminum (or plastic). But it would be hella expensive, to machine, just because of shear machining time to make something that large and complex, unless you had access to a shop that you could do work free. To make a mold.... that woud be expensive to do a 1 off. If you made a run, you'd be better off. Those covers are sand cast. Its a cheap way of making a casting, but not overly cheap.
If you could find a way to make a mold of the top of the motor that you wanted to cover, maybe someone could fiberglass or carbon fiber it. But an aluminum casting isn't going to be too cheap to get made.

 
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i think he's referring to the spark plug cover, being as he said its plastic, and he already took it off. and was looking at the DIY for making an aluminum one. it has to be the spark plug cover.

 
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What I gather is he's looking to make the engine look like this:

and mimic the red cover without actually making a valve cover.
If thats all you're trying to do, then just measure the dimensions of the existing valve cover, get a big sheet of aluminum cut it up so you can bend it, then you're going to have to weld it all together. Welding aluminum isn't too much fun, you need to know what you're doing. Its not going to look nearly as good as if you cast it or machined it from an aluminum block. It will look home made unless you're Jesse James or something and you're a metal working whiz.

 
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boiler, don't know about you, but my valve cover isn't plastic. i believe it would melt. i think he's talking about extending the spark plug cover onto the top of the block to make it look like that. im assuming he's wanting to paint the block one color, and make an aluminum spark plug cover by hammering the form of the plastic one into it, using the plastic spark plug cover as a template. i may be wrong, but by reading, this is what i gather.

 
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Well why the hell do you think I said this:
So all you really did was repeat the same thing I said.

 
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take a look at the K20 covers that says "DOHC i-VTEC", i wanna kinda mimic those.