I guess this is what I would use to dress up the wires under the hood. Well anyway, to anyone who has done this, what sizes do I need, and how much (length)? Also, what do you all use to clean the engine bay (remove dirt), and what's the quickest way without soaking the opti in the process?

 

I use a brush like the little ones that come with dust pans to knock off loose dirt and get in those nooks and crannies. Then, lots of rags and Simple Green. That stuff is great! For shining up the plastic and rubber bits, I use tire shine. For the ABS and various other lines, I use some fine steel wool, then hit them up with some Never Dull. They shine up quick.

If you're feeling extra motivated, polishing the MAF, TB, plenum (mine is also red now), fuel rails, etc., also looks awesome. I went off the deep end and removed the big accessory bracket, cleaned it up to a brushed finish, then polished the most visible parts on top. I also repainted the alternator brace, replaced my noisy stock alt with a powder coated one from www.mralternator.com And now I'm riding out an MBA addiction. This stuff just never ends But - looks awesome.

Oh yeah, the convo tubing.. you can remove one or two, take them down to Autozone, Advance, wherever, and check out what they've got. They usually have tons of it. I just replaced the ugly ones with regular black tubing. Those yellow, red, blue, whatever, ones just never looked right to me..

 

I would go with black, but all mine are in good shape and I want to liven the engine up some. As far as color, I have a silver and black car (front silver fades to black in a checkered flag pattern), so the engine bay is silver. I was thinking about doing yellow under the hood. Does anyone know what this would look like, or have better color suggestions?

 

Im sure most people won't agree with me, but I personally think that anything other than black tubing looks bad. When I see an engine bay with tons of colored wire loom all over the place, it looks very tacky. I've seen some nice alternatives (albeit a lot more expensive using a plastic based shrink wrap, or rubber tubing. Of course, nothing looks as good as metal hose!

 

I would say stick with black, and clean up the rest of the engine. After all, that's the most important thing under the hood, not the wiring. Ricers make the wiring highly visible so that people are like "Oooh, bright shiny stuff!" because their cars have nothing else to them. We don't have that problem, so I say bring out the beauty of the american pushrod v-8 . Do like jkipp84 did, polish the rest of the engine, make that the focal point of the engine compartment. Then paint the intake manifold, get or paint the TB plate, and then try to just make the rest as clean as possible.

But if you feel the only way to liven up the engine compartment is to use color, I say go with red. Not too bright or gaudy, but not too subtle at the same time. But again, I say leave that to the ricers.

Tom