Experience vs Manuals

[Shawn]

I’ve worked in I.T. for nearly 20 years now. When I went to college…there wasn’t the I.T. programs there are today unless you wanted to be a UNIX mainframe administrator or BASIC programmer. While I have years of vendor related training, the majority of my knowledge and comfort in this field has come from years of trial and error. In this field, as in many other fields, there is the “manual” way…and the “experience” way to do things. While manuals provide best practices and for the most part ARE accurate and need to be followed, sometimes experience trumps books.

I found this recently while working on my 2000 Honda CRV. Valve cover gasket was shot and decided it was time to do a valve adjustment while I was in there. I’ll admit, while I have rebuilt engines and do the majority of all my own service work on my vehicles…I haven’t had the pleasure of doing a valve adjustment on a Honda…CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

SO…I opened my trusty manual and it stated to start with cylinder 1…with both “UP” cam arrows pointing straight up. After intake and exhaust were adjusted to turn the cams ninety degrees counterclockwise (following the firing order of 1,3,4,2) and adjust the lash on cylinder 3’s valves. Turn the cams another 90…adjust cylinder 4, then turn the cams another 90 and adjust number 2. Didn’t take long at all and buttoned the valve cover back up with a new gasket and went to start my CRV. Needless to say…it seemed every single valve was too loose…lifter chatter like you wouldn’t believe.

SO…I went to YouTube and found your video on doing a valve adjustment on an Acura B18 engine. Near identical, but just wanted to see how you did them and gain some insight. One thing I noticed was you had the lobes of the cam pointing straight up…in other words you were adjusting truly on the base circle of the cam lobe. When I adjusted mine using the manual’s method…the lobes were both pointed sideways. While it appears the manual way should have worked as the lobes were not touching the valve in any way, there seems to have been a big difference. Now, this difference may be to cam wear or simply my inexperience in doing valve adjustments and not having the “feel”…I have used feeler gauges for years and was fairly confident in my adjustments the first time around.

SO…Back to NAPA for another $30 valve cover gasket (don’t get me started on the 3 acorn nuts I stripped resulting in me having to cut through three valve cover studs to get them off and $50 later at the Honda dealership for three frickin’ studs and nuts) and opened her up again and adjusted them as explained in your video. Guess what? Smoothest my CRV has run in a very long time.

SO…this simply brings me to my suggestion. Please don’t change a damn thing. Sometimes experience just trumps books and am grateful you choose to share that experience with all of us. Even down to the little tricks like removing the plugs and using the PS pump to turn the engine. Please keep doing what you’re doing…you have a subscriber for life.

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[EricTheCarGuy]

Thanks for sharing your experience. In fact, I’ve done a video on this topic.

Thanks also for your kind words about my work. I always love hearing how my work helps people. Trust me, I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way myself.

Good luck with your next repairs and thanks again.

[Kevin]

Due to the propensity of the valves to tighten on the B20 engines in the first Gen CRV’s many of the owners on the hondasuv site adjust them to the loose side of spec with the Go/No-Go method. You sound like you’re much better going by feel than I am so I fully embraced the Go/No-Go method when I was introduced to it around ten years ago 🙂

[EricTheCarGuy]

As I’ve stated in all of my valve adjustment videos, if you’re not experienced with it, I don’t recommend you attempt it. I’ve had several years of experience adjusting valves. That means I’ve had times where I’ve had to remove valve covers AGAIN to do a readjustment after everything cooled down. Do that enough, and you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully you didn’t learn the lesson because you got the valves too tight and burned up an exhaust valve.

In my opinion, that’s the only true way to gain that knowledge as I don’t believe it’s something that can be taught or read in a manual.

[Author]

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