Recently I’ve been faced with an ever-increasing glut of rat rods, retro rods, or whatever you want to call them, with phony valve covers on small-block Chevys. I hate that. If you have a Chevy, I say own it. Don’t fake it up or you’re basically telling everyone who looks at your car, “Hi, I decided to use the world’s most expected engine in my car, but I’m kind of embarrassed about that so I’m going to make it look like I was not, in fact, too lazy or broke to run something more interesting.”

I’ve seen fake valve covers to make your Mouse look like a Rat, a Hemi, an Ardun, or a DOHC. Bogus, bogus, bogus, and bogus. Even when guys show more creativity by hand-fabbing some real vintage covers to fit, it’s (you guessed it), bogus. And an inexcusable violation.

Check out some of these over-the-counter fakes here.

While we’re at it, Don Garlits loses a lot of hero points for licensing his name to this stuff. Fake blowers and injector stacks are grounds for dismissal. And did you know that you can also buy phoney nitrous kits, whistles to make your car sound like it has a turbo, or a speaker for BOV sounds.  You can even make any car sound like a real V8.

I hope you’ll still be able to eat lunch today. If not, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to stop yourself from surfing for even more fake-out products. Do share. It’s like a train wreck, isn’t it?

This once I have to give some credit to, mostly because I can’t name the source for the valve covers, and it looks like they work with Chevy center-bolt heads. Any ideas?