I used gloss and it came out great..... Are you keeping the cover silver,
then just painting the lettering?

Here's what I did
1st  Cleaned then painted the whole engine cover with a semi-flat black
engine paint.
2nd Painted the lettering with several thick-ish coats of testors gloss red
3rd painted the VW logo silver.

The lettering looks great, looks like the gloss paint was just poured into
the recesses because it's smooth as glass ...
 Even Wally said it looks cool - I will develop pics soon to show this, the
red wires and the polished intake.

maybe I had better results with the gloss because I painted the cover black
first OR because I did several thick coats?
jim

------------ Previous Message from  Bryan Billings <billingscodenet>
on  02/18/98 12:23:59 AM ----------

Ok I learned the hard way to use flat paints only when painting the VR6
2.8L Logo on the engine cover.  I am going with flat testors yellow.  I
will let you know how it comes out.
Bryan Billings

Guys,

My arts and crafts project for this weekend was to paint my engine
 cover.  After removal, and inadvertently breaking one of the tabs, I
 sanded it lightly with fine emery cloth.

I used YELLOW (crap I forgot what brand) I think Plasti-Kote and
 applied several (4 or 5 actually) light coats over 3 days.  I used
 Testors paint pens to do the letters and VW logo.  I painted the
 raised part of the VW logo BLUE and the VR6 and the 2 and the 8 in
 RED.  The hyphen and decimal point were some in black.

Looks sweet, just needs the final clear coat of Plasti-Kote engine enamel.

The Testor's paint pens aren't as accurate as I was hoping for, but my
 patience persevered and it looks cool.  I'll take pics once I
 re-install the cover.

BTW, I finally have scanned pics of my GTI, if anyone wants them.

Regards,
Manny