Valve Clearance & Timing Issues

Since we bought the car we knew we had to reduce the valve clearance since everything about the car sucked and the lifters were very loud. In fact I didn't notice how loud they were until we fixed them and the car is a lot quieter now. Cool. I knew we'd need a feeler gauge so I picked one up for about 7 bucks at Canadian mafacka, of course.

After taking off the intake and valve cover Mitch asked me if I've ever done this before. Never in fact have I ever done something like this but it ended up being really easy once we discovered some things. We took out the spark plugs which we will likely replace in the future but with the plugs out and battery disconnected we were pretty safe I assume to turn the engine by hand from the crank shaft pulley. Interesting to note it appeared as if our 4th spark plug wire wasn't connected properly, and possibly the car was only firing on 3 cylinders. Mitch jacked up the car and took off the front passenger wheel to access the crank shaft pulley. Some cars use special tools to turn it but we just grabbed a 3/4" socket and a little bit of man power.


Since we don't have a timing light we sort of guessed where top dead center was on our numbers 1 and 4 pistons for adjusting the valve clearances. We carefully just placed a long screwdriver where the spark plug was, turned the engine by hand and watched it go up and down. When it was all the way up and both the valves were closed we knew we had the TDC of the compression stroke. (I think, if you know this is wrong drop me a line).

Lucky for us we only had 8 valves to do since our engine is so small and old. We almost very easily could have had a car with 24. We also had 2 replacement valve cover gaskets that came with the car, so we made sure to throw another one on when we sealed it up, greasing it in oil first. Closed everything up, reinstalled the intake and we also changed out the fuel filter. Our fav. Lordco was surprised to find they had one in stock, and it was only $5 or so.

As you can see from Mitch cutting open the old fuel filter, it was very much clogged up.

First starting up the car we found we had no need to prime it anymore and the engine was of course much quieter. Our idle was still very poor however and so was our fuel economy and performance, so we decided to start messing carefully with our timing. Again since we don't have a timing light we were just guessing by rotating the distributer. We started getting close to what we want, but I think we will need to go get ourselves a light and do things properly.



Lots of updates to the Book of Morris!

-steve