Back to New York

We went back to New York this past weekend to finish restoration of the engine.  First thing we tackled was replacing the engine head back in place and adjusting the valve spacing (rocker arm clearance), but before doing this, we marked the crankshaft pulley where pistons 2 and 3 were at top dead center (the pulley already had a marking for where pistons 1 and 4 were at top dead center; the marking for pistons 2 and 3 was opposite of 1 and 4).  (These markings will be used later).

Crankshaft pulley marking

Dropping the rocker shaft in place

After tightening everything down to the torque spec, the next step was to check the valve spacing clearance.  To do this, we rotated the flywheel to get the pistons adjusted at top dead center of the compression cycle (markings from the step above helped here).  Then the valve spacings of the top dead center cylinders were adjusted to spec.

A feeler gauge blade of  .010" (the Haynes manual spec for valve clearance) was slid into the spacing and the individual rocker arms were adjusted by tightening the ball pin. This was repeated 8 times for each rocker arm (flywheel rotation was done according to which valves we were working on).

Adjusting the valve spacing

Next up, we checked the oil pump circulation and that required installing a new oil filter first.  This turned out to be more of an ordeal than it should have been...so I will save this for a separate post.