If you really want chrome, IMHO your best option is to ask around and find a good chromer. Then be prepared to lighten your wallet. Good quality chroming is real expensive. Look at some of the Ebay auctions for TTA and GN chrome parts - unbelievable. Because in the end, there is no substitute for chrome if that's what you want!
Powdercoating is great on the intake. Jet-Hot coating is another good option. Just polishing the intake is a waste on these motors because once they are in operation they will get grungy and you can't re-polish them easily - too much stuff in the way.
For the alternator you can buy a Powermaster. They come polished or chrome and you can keep your original.
You can get an Accufab polished throttle body and plenum from vendors like Jack Cotton.
I would use billet stuff in some places. For example, the water neck. The stock piece is junk; the billet looks good and wears better.
If you want to really get trick and are thinking about removing your a/c, look into the billet a/c delete stuff that Cotton's and Cal Hartline sells. REAL nice.
Everyone has their own idea of what to do with valve covers. I love it; it makes each car more individual. If you do a lot of polished and chrome stuff under the hood, consider polishing the fins on the valve covers and then black krinkle-coating the remainder. It offsets all the chrome and looks awesome IMHO.
Kirbans, Johns Performance and others have the cover-over stuff: blower motor, EGR solenoid, washer bottle caps, etc. You can go broke on that small stuff pretty easy
I'm deeply disappointed with Kirban's stuff. They used to have decent quality chrome and the last few things I bought were absolute junk. They were dull and tarnished badly virtually right out of the bag. One part went bad sitting in the plastic bag in my room.
Where it get really expensive is when you try and buy another set of parts to chrome and keep your originals. Stuff like the heater pipes and hard vacuum lines off the throttle body are hard to come by and not cheap.
Chrome is contagious. IMHO, it needs to be balanced. Once you chrome one thing the part next to it looks dull and you do that one. That's how people end up with 80% chrome under the hood I guess.
I wish some people took more interest in their under-hood appearance. I love to look at peoples motors at car shows to see what each person has done, even if it's just restoration.
