Shoptalkforums.com

I just got my RAT solid Rocker spacers, and they are wider than what will fit. How much side to side play should there be between the rockers. with the aluminum spacer and 1 of the 2 shims, I have .025 play. The Shims are about .040. How much extra room do they need?

Russ

Has anyone used the RAT solid spacer kit yet?

What did you do to make them fit?

John C has a note on his correction shims, if you look on his site. He recomends .010" .025 will be noisy.

Ron

I have recently changed our solid spacers. This was to tighten up the clearances a bit for quieter valve train. We have just started selling these after having excellent results with them in the engine shop..

The new arrangement generally will install with about .005 clearance, but on some heads they will have no clearance or very little. The spacers are made of aluminum and are very easy to sand to fit for the desired amount of clearance.

If you need to remove some material to set your clearance, do so with a belt sander or a flat file can also do the job very easily. I do not like more than .010 clearance- more than that and they are very loud.

On the bronze ones I made....I ran about .003" to .004" cold. They closed to right at .001 to nil when hot. I would assume that the aluminum ones would close from .005" cold to about .001 to nil (?). As long as they are not tight/binding....the smaller the gap when at maximum temp...the quieter and the more accurate your valve geometry will be and less wear to guides and adjuster tips. Ray

Yes, the reason I decided to make up these new spacers was to get the play out and get more oil up to the adjusters and guides instead of it pissing past the rockers/shims..

With these units .005 will result in a hot setting of .002... The spacers do not get very hot as they are constantly soaked with oil

Russ1302 wrote:Has anyone used the RAT solid spacer kit yet?

What did you do to make them fit?

Are the ones you are referring to here, listed as rocker spacers?

http://www.aircooledtechnology.com/stor ... hp?cat=314

Jake pointed me at a couple of links last time, but it wasn't a "kit" at that point...

MASSIVE TYPE IV wrote:Yes, the reason I decided to make up these new spacers was to get the play out and get more oil up to the adjusters and guides instead of it pissing past the rockers/shims..

That is quite clever, as the original hydro-2,0 vanagon engines have very loose fitting spacers. Its almost unreal how over-sized those original vw spacers are

Tnx,
Walter

I used spare shims from the 1.7s to tighten the solids up!

Don

The ones going into my current build have a ball millede groove on the inside. They are really just bored out blocks of bronze. I am going to be running a small bore oil line to the blocks to pressure feed them. The shim on the end has to be notched to let oil past from the ball mill groove. In this method....I think things will run quieter, cooler and smoother with a slightly pressure fed rocker shaft. Ray

JAKE, Just got around to checking out the noise I had and it looks like I need to put some shims in the rockers as I have one that has .012 clearance. Can I get some shims from you. THANKS CLIFF

Cliff, Try loosening the two rocker arm nuts and squeezing the rocker pads together. while squeezing them you can tighten the nuts back and retorque them to 20 lb/ft. This should remove the .012 play and quieten things up. Shims are .040 thick, so you would have to "grind fit" the rockers to fit them in place... The squeeze trick works very well.

That does work!

Ron

I used the squeeze trick as well, but found sometimes it put the rockers a little too tight. I then put a 5 thou feeler gauge in the assembly before squeezing it

The feeler gauge works VERY well for this.