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Valve clearance woes!


Hi

Just as a matter of interest: To what specification do you guys set 
your valve clearances? I seem to have conflicting information on this 
subject as I have quite a few VW manuals and some of them give 
different values.

The official 1965 VW 1500 workshop manual says 0.004 inch or 0.01 mm,
so does the official 1969 VW manual part M (Engine and Clutch).

Chilton's VW repair & tune-up guide (1967) says 0.004 inch or 0.01 mm 
as does Clymer's VW 1600 owner's manual (1966).

Now the trouble starts:

The type-3 Haynes manual (1974) says: "Valve clearances an all VW 
engines are now 0.006 inch or 0.15 mm. If there is a sticker on your 
engine saying anything else, take it off."

Autodata VW Type-1 (sorry, my brother used to have one and guess who 
had to fix it all the time!!!) workshop manual (1989) also says 0.006 
inch or 0.15 mm.

Glenn's VW tune-up guide (196?) says 0.008 inch or 0.2 mm for some 
early engines and 0.004 inch or 0.01mm for the rest.


I don't have a valve clearance sticker on my engine anymore but I 
have always adjusted my valves as per the Haynes manual to 0.006 inch 
or 0.01 mm.

Why would VW have increased the valve clearances retro-actively on 
all engines from the mid seventies onwards? Does it make sense to 
increase the valve clearance when the vehicle is being operated in a 
predominantly hot environment? If the minimum valve clearance is 
0.004 inch or 0.01 mm I can see a considerable performance loss if 
the valves are set bigger. Am I making any sense here?

What do you lot say? I'm all for adjusting my valve clearance to 
0.004 inch or 0.01 mm just to see what happens. Any ideas will be 
welcomed

Regards

Adriaan Loedolff
adriaan@norton.ctech.ac.za
'69 Variant Automatic (200 000 miles + and still cruisin' after all of these years!)


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