Valve Adjustment - Three Perspectives

[Oldman]

Finally you need the get that bail arm back into place. This is a pain in the arse if you ask me and is a good reason to have solid heat exchangers.
I usually lever that last bit off the exchangers. 
(Mod. note: If you have an assistant, thread some heavy cord through the bail arm and ask them to pull/lean away from the bus. This lessens the tension on the rocker cover and the bail arm will snap back easily...saves any pressure on the heat exchangers too....  )



So that's one side finished, now on to the side that I scrape my knuckles on. Again, rotate the engine 180 degrees ANTICLOCKWISE until the mark on the pully lines up with 0 on the timing scale



The rotor arm is now firing on cylinder #3



There's that notch in the distributor body I was talking about earlier that shows where cylinder #1 fires. See it's directly opposite the position of the rotor am at the bottom of the picture just above the red wire
 

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Remember you're now doing Cylinder #3 which is towards the front of the bus. I always have to check this cos I'm a bit of an idiot. Luckily VW help me out a bit here as they've marked which cylinder is which on the tinware. This is the first thing I see when I look at the tinware. A big number 4, which means that #3 must be the front one



Again, checking Inlet (left hand side of left hand pair) and exhaust (right hand side of left hand pair). As usual #3 exhaust was a little tight and needed a minor adjustment



Moving on to #4 is that same again. Rotate the engine ANTICLOCKWISE through 180 degrees until the mark lines up with 0 on the timing scale.

Mine was fine and I didn't take photos this time, but it's the right hand pair of the photo above. I changed the gasket as I did earlier and popped the rocker cover back on.

The final photo I took was a reminder to myself. 



Once you've finished make sure you put the distributor cap back on. I nearly always forget this and try and start the bus, then wonder why it won't start. 

Hope these photos help a few newbies. Saves me a fortune on servicing doing this myself. Particularly as you should do it every 5,000km. personally I do it religously every 4,000km and a few times in between to. It tells you what's happening to the valves and heads if you check it regularly engough.

Next jobs is to get rid of all that dust in the engine bay.
Bloody unsealed roads....