Tackled the passenger side valve cover today, here are the few things I would add to Joey’s excellent DIY.

erWin manual says to disconnect the fuel hose from the fuel rail pipe. Probably would have made it a little easier to get the cover off and then back on again, but I skipped this step. The connector at the MAF airflow sensor has the clip on the bottom so you can’t see what is going on. If you push in and back on the lever towards the back of the plug and give it a tug it will pop off. Here is a picture of the bottom of the plug:

Once I removed the air filter housing I could see that it looked like there was in fact some oil leaking:

When I got the coil packs out there was a little oil on the end of one of them, but one of them had an oil film from tip to tail:

I don’t think I am getting any misfires, so I cleaned it up and put it back in. Maybe the seal was leaking a little bit. When I pulled the old gasket off the valve cover it did feel a bit brittle at the edges. Almost seven years old, so understandable (I have owned the car since new). Also in the pic above you can see the coil pack puller I bought on eBay. It worked just fine.

Initially I did not remove the air guide attached to the throttle valve, but it was a bit of a pain when I took the cover off, and I wanted to be able to get at the sealing surface easily, so I took it off:

The factory clearly used high temp sealant, and were a little sloppy with same:

As for the driver’s side, I opted to not use sealant with the new gaskets. Again, seems to me the gaskets are held in place very nicely by the deep groove in the valve covers, as well as the bolt washers.

I didn’t think this side was any harder than the other side. Lower back bolt is hard to get at, but you can get one of the little ratchets that Joey suggests on it. And on this side you can even get a long T30 bit on the lower back bolt at an angle, but well enough to spin it out once it is loose.

I hope I didn’t over-torque the bolts. Unfortunately given bolt locations it is just not possible to get a torque wrench on a good number of them. I followed the erWin tightening pattern, snugging slowly, and went until it hurt my hand to go much tighter with a short 1/4 ratchet drive. Though I wonder if there is a downside to over tightening other than breaking the bolts, because there are a couple of washers and a rubber grommet, which if designed properly maybe bottom out and create the right pressure on the gasket via the compression of the grommets.