what to do with engine cover?

You can paint it.

get some high heat temp paint. sand that bitch down and paint it. you new rollas lucky to have plastic ones, '93-97 has teh metal valve cover. and its great! i get to chrome it out! ^_^

what i did was just paint the wording "VVTI" in red

find a shop that will carbon fiber it for you. That would look sweet.

carbon fiber will melt...

then why is there a CF engine cover available?

is there really? never seen it before.

carbon fiber wont melt. Ive seen many people on Supraforums with CF covers.

I know someone in the corolla community used to have a CF cover. Not sure who, maybe Derrick or Pete?

yeah...Vamp has it.

alright yeah, it was derrick. I dont know why I thought Pete.......he has a 2ZZ, not a 1ZZ, and his engine is IS300 blue

lol...yeah...silly

if it would melt, then there probably wouldn't be CF hood, cuz the heat from the engine could melt it

That CF engine cover is made by TRD. Its around a hundred bucks.

It cost me 90 bucks, but i love it.

The TRD engine cover imo doesn't fit with the engine because it doesn't wrap down to the headers like the plastic cover does...so it sort of looks like a hard piece of paper sitting on top of an engine.

If I'm to put a carbon fiber engine cover on, it'd have to be custom made from the plastic one...but I'm doing engine accents anyway, so the carbon fiber cover would be pointless.

FYI, the TRD engine cover was made for 9th gen with a supercharger. So people dont have to cut the stock one to fit the supercharger.

the first design was a tight fit, but it still fit. Vamp's is one of those, and i can promise you it does fit on his engine. the newer version doesn't even wrap around, so fitment isn't an issue.

now see that is love at first site

Paint the engine cover, how?

How exactly did you paint it? With a brush, paint pen, or spray? I tried doing it with a brush and you can see brush lines. I did it when the paint was really wet, and did it quickly, but it still looks funky. I want it to look nice and professional.

Mask off the rest of it then spray paint it.

Or you can buy the vinyl from this site.

http://www.importequipment.com/matrix_vvtli_engine_cover_sticker.htm

Spray paint.. yeah.. I was too lazy to think about it.
Vinyl is even better. Matter of fact, I'll do that.

I painted mine using a foam brush and engine paint that I sprayed into a cup I made out of foil that I pressed around the spray paint cap.

Since you have the spray can, why you didn't just spray it directly to the cover Vamp?

because it's much easier to brush it on then to mask it off. Trying to mask between the letters so that no paint accidently makes it's way through is a pain.

Yeah it looks like a pain to mask off.
I applied vinyl to it, and cut the edges by hand. It was a little tedious. There is no way in hell I will cover the 16 Vavle lettering, it would drive me insane. Well, it came out ok. The time it cost vs. durability factor, it's not worth hand cutting vinyl for. I think I will try scanning my cover, creating vectorized version of it to cut out on the vinyl cutter. If that doesn't yeild satisfactory results I'm going to try the foam brush method.

I used charcoal metallic paint with red vinyl for the letters.

here's mine: