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Valve Adjustments. Sooner or later you may need to do this. |
| 3/7/2007 After a complete engine rebuild and very little burn in time, I heard a little clicking when I rev-ed the engine. My thought was that it was a small adjustment needed with the valves. Here are the steps I used to make that adjustment. I am no expert, but this may help you. First, remove the fender, we are going to do this under the exhaust manifold and I want to be able to see what I am doing (easily). 
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3/7/2007 There are two bolts holding the valve cover on. I believe they are 1/2in. Unscrew them, and pop the valve cover off. Note: depending on how old your valve cover gasket is, you may need to replace it. 
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3/7/2007 Here you see the cover popped off. Gasket still looks good, but how do I get the valve cover out? I removed the PCV line and disconnected the exhaust pipe as well.
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3/7/2007 Ok, now that the cover is off, I removed the PCV line and the exhaust pipe which allowed me to get the cover out. I wiped down around the cover, and made sure I didn't have any drips.
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3/7/2007 In order to adjust the valves they have to be in a certain position, so turning the crank will be necessary. I removed the spark plugs to make that an easier chore.
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3/7/2007 It doesn't really matter the order of the valves you are going to adjust, so you can start with any of them in the closed position. The tappet will be all the way down when closed. Have someone turn the crank (clockwise) until your designated valve is in the down position.
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3/7/2007 Now, if you think about this, you have 8 valves. 4 are intake, and 4 are exhaust. There are always two valves in position at the same time. The diagram below helps explain this. For example, If I want Cylinder 1 Intake valve to be closed (so I can check the gap .014), then Cylinder 4 Exhaust is in the same position and I can check it. Therefore, you can check two valves with each crank position.
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3/7/2007 Here you see I am checking the gap of the valve in Cylinder 1 intake. Therefore, Cylinder 4 Exhaust can be checked as well.
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3/7/2007 Here is a close up of what you are checking the gap on. According the the TM the gap should be .014 when cold for both intake and exhaust.
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3/7/2007 To adjust these, you will need two 1/2in open end wrenches. In my case, I had a bigger gap than I wanted. You place one wrench on the tappet (bottom) and one wrench on the top nut. Then you separate the wrenches to make the gap more narrow. In my case, I needed to bring go from .015 to .014. When I make the adjustment, I check again with the gap tool.
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| 3/7/2007 After each pair of valves get (from diagram above) get verified, turn the crank to the next pair as shown in the above diagram, and repeat the steps. I finished mine in about 1 hr. I needed someone to hold my LED pen light and to turn the crank, so it will help to have a friend. Here you see I have cleaned my valve cover off, in preparation of putting it back on. 
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3/7/2007 Valve cover installed back on.
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3/7/2007 While the spark plugs where out, I cleaned them up and re-gapped them.
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3/7/2007 Replace the fender and components and you are done. The complete task will take about 4hrs.
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