VALVE ADJUSTMENT

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 5, 1 November 1924, Page vii (Supplement)

VALVE ADJUSTMENT

(Continued from Page v. of Motor Supplement home securely, and to do this while maintaining the gap unchanged is not easy. There is no “royal road to success” rather is it a question of “hit and miss” ; and the first time a novice attempts the task it is almost a certainty that he will find either that the valve is held permanently open, or that there is a gap of an appreciable fraction of afoot! A final test with the fingers should he made, therefore, before attempting to run the engine. Each of the eight (or twelve, if the engine be a six-cylinder) tappets should have just perceptible movement and no more when an attempt is made to move it up and down in its guide. It is better to set about the task systematically start at cylinder number one and complete one valve at a time. And it is important that the cam for each valve should be clear of the foot of the tappet which it is intended to adjust. It does not matter whether the piston is precisely at the top or bottom of its stroke, so long as the tappet is quite free from the cam. This method of valve adjustment may appear to the novice too delightfully free-and-easy to be really practical, but actually it is probable that a motorist with little experience with tools and gauges will get more efficient results than if he attempted to regulate the gap to a certain definite metric measurement when the engine was cold. In the latter case, for one thing, a different setting would be necessary for the inlet as compared with the exhaust valves, whereas by the “free-and-easy” method all gaps are the same —the thickness of the oil film.