MF 65 valve lash-hot vs cold

patiolant

Member
Posted this in tractor talk, but realized it may be more appropriate here. Adjusting the valve lash on my MF65 gas. Problem is that the spec"s call for hot measurements of .016 intake and .018 exhaust, but it took me several hours to get to the valves by the time I removed the gas tank, etc., and other things interrupted the job. So, is the best approach to add .002 to the measurements if the valves are cold? What do you guys do in this situation?
 
I rigged up a small gas tank and set the valves with the engine running, after it had warmed up.

It is good to run the tractor with the valve cover off, to make sure the rockers are getting oil. My I.T. manual had bad info on installing the rocker shaft. If you do it their way you block oil flow to rockers.
 
Another way to do it is if you have a block heater in it just plug it in for several hours with the engine wrapped in a blanket. It will warm up to operating temp. This works good for torquing the head bolts when hot as recommended too.
 
Yeah, this is my only pet peave with fergies... when I had farmalls and AC's, you could get at the valves in a couple minutes, and run all day without anything above them if you had to. Center of hood was off, no tank in the way, and gas stayed connected... but then... they weren't fergies or masseys!
Whatever you do, don't make them too tight, what's the old saying? 'Better to error on the side of caution'? Safer to have them a little loose and noisy than too tight and have worse problems in the long run. after all. you don't want to have to field strip half the tractor more than necessary right? Take you time and good luck!
 
Yeah, my big concern was for valves being too tight. When I bought it 20 years ago it started to run very poorly and the issue was tight valves on the number 4 cylinder. It has been running poorly again with similar symptoms, and I was doing the valves again as a matter of principle. It turns out that they were still within 0.001-0.002 of expected. So other issues are at play this time.

I was also able to measure within 30 minutes of running, and again the next morning. All measurements were within 0.001 of eachother. So hot vs cold doesn"t seem to matter much on this engine.

Thanks for all the replies.
 

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