Hi, a couple months ago I bought a KE38 wagon which has been great, a few days ago I noticed a loud ticking noise when throttle is applied. The noise sounds just like lifter tick, so I adjusted the valve clearances with no luck. Any ideas what else could make a noise like that? Cheers

Sounds like an exhaust leak to me.

Probably blown out an exhaust gasket. The manifold ones are painful.

You can get one piece gaskets rather than the standard 2 piece which is a really good thing.

They are called extractor gaskets, with numerous suppliers on ebay, but repco etc probably have them too

 

Yeah, this sort of thing..  pretty common with  K motor.  Make sure the bolts and nuts can do up further than the manifold thickness and aren't binding on dirt and rust.

https://www.rollaclub.com/board/topic/27374-one-piece-manifold-gasket-who-makes-them-4k/

Still might be a tappet, the rocker face wears into a U-shape where it rubs on the top of the valve, and the feeler gauge goes across the U instead of measuring where the valve touches.  Solved by setting tappets with a big circular protractor on the crank, like setting up a hot cam.  You should feel when the rocker touches as the pushrod won't be able to be turned with your fingers.  Its not really likely though, K motors don't suffer from that as much as other motors do.  I've had to find a bit of wire of the right thickness in the past, something like a bread tie I measured with calipers. That sat in the groove of the rocker and gave me the gap needed.

I suppose another way would be to close the tappets down to zero gap then back them off the same number of turns of the screw.  Can you feel if one gap is bigger than the others when you rock it with max gap?

Edited January 13, 20206 yr by altezzaclub