I did a valve job on my 27. I only been driving it a little over a year. I thought it ran ok but what a difference it made.

Tim

I hear you loud and clear. I got nothing but crappy valve jobs taking my Ts to some local yahoos. Once I bit the bullet and purchased cutters and did the work myself I noticed a definite increase in performance. On both cars.

Richard:

Where did you obtain your valve tools?
Thanks, jb

All I did was to lap the old valves. I sill have Ford valves so I used A lapping tool with the pins and a valve lifting tool like the one in the service manual as seen on page 92.

Tim

Neway seat cutters and valve seat refacer. I called the phone number and was aided by a rep who selected the size cutters and pilots. The adjustable pilots are the way to go. Follow the directions and its hard to go wrong.
http://www.newayts.com.au/seatguiderest.htm

Richard - Use Neway as a "keyword" and check archives in this forum. Neway valve seat cutter with adjustable pilot is the only way to go in my opinion. Much more accurate than grinding valve seats with stone grinding wheels. Gives you a consistantly perfect 3-angle valve job!

Oops,.....meant that comment for James Bartsch! (Richard obviously knows all about it!)

Richard,....sorry; you and I were typing at the same time,.......harold

Wrong link, try this .http://www.newaymfg.com/frame.htm

Tim, Richard, Harold:

Many thanks for the info.

Tim, any chance your Coupe will be out and about around central NY this summer? I'd love to see it.

jb

Here's an example that doesn't strictly involve the T: For years Briggs made a flathead 5/6 H.P. engine that showed up mostly on snowblowers.The valves operated by the valve stem resting against the cam follower with 8 to 10 thou. clearence. As the valve faces wore,(usually the exhaust was the culprit)the clearence would disappear until the valve would actually stay open. With the head off & piston on TCD compression you could rotate the valve with your fingers.These engines would usually start and run if it wasn't too shot but as soon as you put a load on it it would crap out.Lapping the face and grinding the stem for clearence corrected the problem.

I didn't even grind the valves when I last worked on my 26 touring. They had been ground when I overhauled the engine, and I did what I thought would be a good way to adjust them at the time. I used the valve timing method which is done by the height of the piston. This engine was noisy and never did have much power, but since my other cars are roadsters, I thought it was just the weight of the body that made it slow on the hills and need to shift down more often.

Well about a month ago, I did some extensive tuning and after reading a thread on valve adjustment I decided to adjust mine using the clearance method. Glenn Chaffin uses 15 thousandths, and so since this engine is worn I decided to use 15 myself. I found that some of the valves had as much as 30 thou clearance! I don't have a 15 feeler gauge, but have a 14 and a 16 so I set them to where the 14 would go in and the 16 would not. This engine is smoother and has more power now than it has since I owned the car.
Norm

James my car is a Tudor and I live in Ohio so I don't think I'll be in New York. But thanks for asking. I also set mine at 15 thousandths. The motor runs so much smoother I thought I had lost power till I realized it wasn't vibrating as much.

Tim