Originally Posted by denissca

Bought it last year and put about 7000 miles since then. The engine got progressively more shaky and power was inadequate even after diesel purge, ALDA adjustment and new engine mounts.
I knew it was time for valve adjustment since i have no idea when the previous owners done that (if ever). The car has close to 160K miles now.
When i took the engine cap off i found out that there was no clearance on some of the valves at all, some were off and some were OK.
Since almost all of them kept rotating on me and i had nothing handy to jam them, adjustment job was hard. So, on some of them i did increase the clearance and some of them i did not.
However, i was VERY surprised when i assembled it and started the engine.
I did not have issues starting it on a hot summer day but when running it smoked a lot worse, shook a lot worse and i lost even more power. The question is, how did the engine operation go from bad to worse?