How Do I Set My Valve Clearance?

There are a lot of ways that you can set your valve clearance. You can buy a service manual and follow the procedures to find top dead center of a certain cylinder and measure the gap of certain valves at that point and then rotate a fixed number of degrees and measure another set of valves. 

Or you can do it the easy way!

• Remove the valve cover
• Locate your rocker arms. You will have two per cylinder. 2 cylinder engine = 4 rocker arms. 
• On one side of the rocker arm will be your valve. You will have one exhaust valve and one intake valve per cylinder. On the other side of the rocker arm you will have your pushrod that pushes on the rocker arm from the camshaft. 
• Rotate your engine using a large socket or screwdriver and watch the rocker arms start to move up and down on the valve side.
• Watch for a rocker arm to raise (on the valve side) and then it will momentarily pause, and then start to go back down. 
• During the momentary stopped position you are at the maximum gap portion of the stroke and THIS is where you want to measure or set your gap. 
• Repeat this procedure until you have done this on all of the valves. 

So what do the valves set at? Almost all Yanmar engines set at 0.006" (six thousandths of an inch)