I'm not dead yet...

Well, it's much later than the tomorrow I promised you yesterday. As of tonight, I'm actually putting her all back together. Did I finally give up? Nope, I won. Eventually. Last weekend was an epic struggle though. Where were we? Oh yeah, we thought we were home free.

With the opener rocker pins pulled, it's as easy as the photo to the left to pull the opening rockers out. Here I'm lifting the horizontal left intake rocker. The other intake measured fine so I won't mess with it. The exhaust on this cylinder was out of whack too, so that rocker was also pulled. Just for grins, I went to see if I could slide the rockers without pulling the pins and I could with the timing belt off. I had to turn the cam wheel quite a ways, though, to get the right intake to slide over. At that point, the exhaust rocker would move. The pic above right shows the pulley timing mark at about 4:30. To get the left intake to slide over, I had to spin the pulley back to about 10:00.

To get the opener shims off, I just used my magnetic pick up tool. The closer shim ain't so easy. As a matter of fact, it was a #^$!% and a #!%!$ and !$%& to boot. Lemme put it this way, here's where I about walked away for the day. What you see at the left is the 2nd collet/half-ring/keeper. The 1st one came out fine. This one I didn't pull out all the way before I let the rocker go which pushed the closer shim back up the valve stem and pinched it in place. At this point, it was wedged pretty good. The closer shim couldn't be pulled off the valve stem, nor could I push it down to remove the keeper. Grrrrrrr. What I had to do was push down on the closer as hard as I could while grabbing the keeper with a pair of needlenose pliers. My wife then smacked down on the closer shim (in a line of action in the direction of the valve stem) with a plastic chisel like thing used for working on windshield rubber. It was in the junk drawer of my toolbox and is pretty soft plastic. That was enough to jar it loose. Sweet, closer is out now. All I have to do is measure the existing shims and go down to the right size to give me the desired gap.

You'll have to hear the rest of the horizontal exhaust valve story tomorrow. It's a school night. Mom says I gotta stop.