Porsche Valve Adjustment, 1974 2.0 Options

[NJTom]

While the 914 motor is out of the car to repair the rear main leak, I decided to recheck the valve adjustments because there seemed to be at least one making quite a bit of noise. When each cylinder wast brought up to TDC, I found the valve adjustments to be way too tight — all of them. Can’t quite figure that out as I checked, double checked, and triple checked the adjustments when the engine was on the stand. Who knows why that happened, but frankly, that’s not my concern. So I went through the motions of bringing each piston up to TDC and readjusted the valves. During the process, I just happened to pull on another rocker to see if there was any play — and there was — a lot. As a matter of fact, when #1 piston was @ TDC, there were other pistons at such a stage where at least one valve was closed. In measuring the lash of that closed valve, the gap was greater than when @ TDC in most cases. For example, when piston #1 was at TDC, the respective exhaust is @ .008 and the intake .006 — as they should be. However, when piston 1 is @ TDC, cylinder #2’s intake is closed — reading = .06 (as it should be) and Cylinder 4’s exhaust is closed with a reading of .12 — way too much. I checked and rechecked my findings.

Below is a little summary for all cylinders.

When 1=TDC, #2 intake = .06 & #4 exhaust = .12
When 2=TDC, #1 exhaust = .11 & #3 intake = .13
When 3=TDC, #2 exhaust = .12 & #4 intake = .06
When 4=TDC, #1 intake = .13 & #3 exhaust = .11

All valves of all four cylinders are in spec when @ their respective TDC.

I highly doubt this is normal. Logic says none of the gaps shouldn't be any greater than the TDC readings.