Yeah, sorry to get the cart before the horse. I guess I just like to really visualize the possibilities beforehand to help me kind of get a grip on what I might be dealing with. Thanks sincerely for all your help! Hope I haven't been a pain...I appreciate everybody's patience.

So now I've pulled the valve cover and the chain actually looks great, it's tight, and it has essentially zero "stretch" according to the marks on the cam pulley and the balancer down below. It shows it to be at maybe two degrees after zero. So that's most likely not the issue, eh?

I started checking out the valve clearance and discovered that I don't have a thin enough feeler blade...the lowest I have is a .008, which is pretty much perfect for the exhaust valves, but twice as thick as needed for the intakes.

By the way, the clearance on every exhaust valve is excessive (like .012ish), and I've adjusted the center two, using a box-end 17mm wrench. I'm going tonight to pick up a crowsfoot or some such tool to do the others, which are, as I'm sure you know, essentially inaccessible with normal wrenches.

I have to admit it took me a little bit to figure out how the hell to adjust the valves...the only similar job I've done in the past was on air-cooled VWs, and that type utilizes a locknut with a slotted adjuster. You loosen the locknut and turn the adjuster with a screwdriver in that setup. So you can imagine that I was a bit disoriented at first. The archives helped me finally get my head around it.

On a side note, I've noticed in some other threads that some guys here claim that synthetic oil, or just any quality oil of the right viscosity, may make a difference when it comes to strange noises. Anybody care to comment on that, just for grins?

Thanks again, everybody.

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Carmody
Wichita, Kansas USA
Air Capital of the World


1968 220 (my first MB!)