I lose my keys all the time and decided I should do something about it. I decided to develop my welding skills a bit and made a key holder out of some bar stock and vintage parts!
I don’t have a before image of the valve cover I used, but here is one from the same pile. My father pulled a handful of valve cover sets off junkyard late-50s and 60s Chevy 283s and 327s sometime back in the 80s and they’d been sitting around for the last 40 years waiting to be used.
First was to strip the years of rust and any original paint back down to the metal. The cover was in surprisingly good shape with just some dents on sides. Nothing a body hammer and some finishing putty couldn’t fix.
Filler primed to take care of any small corrosion defects I didn’t take care of with putty. It was then sprayed orange as you see in the first photo
To make a key bracket I cut up this .75 x .125 bar stock and glued it together... very ugly welds but nobody will see them and keys aren’t exactly heavy. Tacked some nuts on to allow bolting the valve cover in place.
I then bent the brackets into shape and drilled some holes big enough for spark plugs, welded the plugs in place, and sprayed everything satin black. These plugs were NOS from the 70s or 80s.