Bank Holiday Tinkerings: Adjusting tappets on 200TDI

First off: Big thanks to the +Land Rover Toolbox Videos and Mr. Higgins (some sterling work you're doing chief!) . Your recent video on adjusting the tappets on a 300TDI was a big help.

So on a somewhat dull bank holiday weekend when the kids are napping, its an opportunity to get the spanners out and tinker under the hood of the landy.

Mines a 200TDI under the hood: a sturdy lump, 2.5litre turbo charged diesel engine with no electronics for timing - simple & robust (provided its looked after)

Whenever I get a bit of time I watch Chris's videos, in particular today, whilst I was doing the washing up. Anyway he mentioned that his vehicle was a bit smokey and had a faint whiff of oil - bit like mine. So thought I'd give mine a look using the video as a guide.

First off was this "rule of nine" which I'd never heard of, being a newbie to this procedure.

Fortunately, this is also covered in one of Chris's earlier videos.

Basically: on a 4-cylinder engine there are typically 8 valves (inlet & exhaust), the order you adjust them should equal 9 - lets uses an example:

• valve 1 down - valve 8 open; 1+8=9
• valve 2 down - valve 7 open; 2+7=9
• valve 3 down - valve 6 open; 3+6=9
• etc, etc

This is how you set the valves you want to adjust before you adjust them. To do this, you turn the crank shaft over manually till you get the valve you want in the right position.

Armed with this knowledge, and the kids having a snooze, 200TDI workshop manual on tablet, I armed myself with some tools and head to the landy.

Tools

• 8mm socket
• for rocker cover bolts and cyclone breather bolt removal
•  30mm socket
• to turn crank over
• 1/2" drive ratchet
• or long bar
• if no long bar, some tubing to extend the reach on the ratchet
• 3/8" drive ratchet
• 13mm spanner
• stubby flat head screw driver
• feeler/thickness gauge (cranked ones are an advantage)

Procedure

 First off you need to remove the cyclone breather and vacuum tubing off the rocker cover using an 8mm socket or spanner and a flat head to loosen any jubilee clips

Once off you can then remove the rocker cover off the top of the engine, take care when removing the cover as the gasket seal comes off with it. When reading the 200TDI service manual though - I did come across this interesting snippet:

Basically its asking to put down a silicone based sealant for the gasket. Yet mine is a rubber one part seal, so older 200TDI owners may possibly need to be aware of this?

Useful note here: Valve #1 is at the front of the engine (bottom of this photo is front), #8 is towards the bulkhead

THICKNESS OF GAUGE YOU SHOULD BE USING IS 0.2mm, THIS IS SPECIFIED IN THE WORKSHOP MANUAL

Its a good idea to have a notepad to hand to record your findings. Bear in mind that you should CHECK first BEFORE you adjust.

With the rocker cover off; you can now begin the procedure of checking the clearance. Here I have taken a screen shot from the 200TDI workshop manual I was using:

Turn the engine over using the 30mm socket and ratchet (with bar if necessary) and follow the order as above. From the video, the valve is full down when the tappet comes down and pauses a short while, whilst the crank is still being turned.

As you can see, using a straight set of gauges is quite tight, but I found that re-positioning them on the holder, you can get the fingers on the same plane as the gap your measuring, thus removing errors from the gauge flexing.

Your looking for just enough clearance to get the gauge between the valve spring cover and the tappet, with the smallest amount of friction. I found there was a little either way on some of them, but not enough to make me consider adjustment.

'scuse the handwriting

 From my readings, I found that valves 2 & 7 were a bit tighter than some, so went ahead and gave them a tweak.

As you can see from the manual illustration and the video's: To adjust the tappet you crack the nut holding the screw in place then using the screw driver and thickness gauges, adjust so the gauge passes under with the tiniest amount of fiction holding it (as per video). Then holding the screw driver in place, nip up the nut again. Afterwards you can torque them up to the exact spec (as stated in the video).

Once done I re-fitted everything and whilst I had the cyclone breather off, I replace the o-ring on it as it had a square edge, like it had been squished. Can't hurt to replace it.

So all in all this took about an hour, tops. Nothing too taxing, just nice and methodical, and could improve your emissions and maybe even recover some lost performance, depending on how far out they were.

I'll see if it has made a difference on my trip to work. But I doubt I'll notice.

If your looking for a 200TDI manual: here's a link to a shared copy on my google drive

This procedure is quite a way down so just keep hammer pgdn till you see it. Also this manual includes a turbo maintenance guide, procedure on how to remove and re-fit a 200TDI in a defender and a guide on fitting a full sized intercooler along with findings on performance from the guy who wrote it (all at the end)

Keep tinkering! 

HAMEG 203-6 Repair: More fruitless searching - VB#3

OK; so poking around at less lethal voltages this time and still getting nowhere.

Nothing much to say on this one, but if you trying to do some repair yourself, then feel free to use this as a rough guide of what you should expect and where.

Take care! I mean it, there's high voltages flying round so watch where you put your fingers!

Also: apologies for the lack of definition on this video, using a different camera.

EEVBlog Forum Posts

Beer review #1 - Co-ops own brand wheat beer

So My first Beer review!

Who doesn't love a good beer!? Especially when its cheap!

And this stuff is definitely cheap at £1.69/500ml bottle. As wheat beers go, its actually remarkably priced and yet does taste like its been brewed to a cost!

The tasting notes on the label are pretty accurate - some citrus, refreshing. Some wheat beers I find, like Paulaner, are somewhat sweet, and that can become sickly after the first or second bottle, but this has less sweetness I find.

As with all wheat beers there's a sort of cloudy/floury taste that matches the look of the beer, but this doesn't make itself as noticable, unlike say Hoegarten.

At 5% (assumed ABV), its strong enough, but not so strong as to make you feel tipsy after the first bottle.

A good chillaxing beer: 4/5

Good health to you, and everything in moderation! Cheers!

Busted HM203-6 - VB#2

So this would probably be my second video blog, hooray!

So I hooked up my scope a few days ago and it worked, nice trace appeared. Next day I plugged in some probes I got donated to me, and nothing, sweet FA!

I my haste, I admit, I didn't note down the scope model number. I thought it was a HM203-7 from pictures I searched for, but then realised it was a HM203-6 - DOH!

I noticed after some of the connector numbers did not match those on the schematics!

With the correct schematics in hand, I set about looking at a few high voltage lines - why the high voltage lines? Well I was getting no display yet I was getting the trigger LED to light when I put in the test signal on channel 1, which lead me to suspect the tube was not displaying the signal yet the triggering system was seeing the signal.

I LIKE TO MAKE CLEAR, THERE ARES SOME PRETTY NASTY VOLTAGES THAT WILL BELT YOU IF YOU ARE NOT CAREFUL OR ARE INEXPERIENCED - TAKE CARE OR DO NOT UNDERTAKE IF YOU DON'T FEEL CONFIDENT!

Here are links to relevant things:
Hameg HM203-7 service manual
Hameg HM203-6 service manual
EEVblog forum post

Batteriser - most dangerous thing to education since Michael Gove!

I've just recently Seen Dave Jones on the +EEVblog post yet another video about the +BatteriserOfficial.

Now in it he, yet again, demonstrates in plain English and perfect clarity, logical and scientific reason why the video response to his original debunking, is utter twaddle!

OK so the video's aren't submitted by the Batteriser company itself, but the +Batteriser Batteroo channel (fan based).

Now I really don't understand Batteriser is trying to achieve here! In the video above they clearly show EXACTLY what they are doing wrong which is measuring the battery voltage OPEN CIRCUIT!

NO NO NO NO NO! That's not how you measure battery performance!

In an identical video to the one above, the description reads: "This video by the professors of electrical engineering.."

And which professors would these be? Cos I can show this video to about 5 Professors at where I work and they will put this product down so hard you'd need the council to come fix the pavement!

I don't mind you trying to flog the product, that's fine, but what I don't like is the fact your peddling utter bullshit and potentially warping the minds of future engineers and scientist!

I know its probably not the company itself as they have yielded to some flaws in forms of responses on their website - http://batteriser.com/faq/ - but I'd definitely try and get your fan based to STFU. Especially the clearly know nothing about electronics!

Maybe if they spent like 30mins reading about the basics of batteries, then maybe they'd know what the hell they were talking about!

So anybody out there think this is a product you'd want to by - bear in mind your funding people who could be potentially damaging education and peddle cods-wallop and in return you get a fancy battery clip that does nothing.

</rant>