Alfa Pages

[Kevin Smith]

I finally got the cylinder head off the left side of my 'dead' 1700 Alfa 33 Cloverleaf Sportwagon's engine.
The valves all appear to be straight (although a bit coked-up) and turning the cam wheel makes all the valves do the right sort of thing, although the amount of lift looks very low. The valves don't really protrude beyond the cylinder head.
Anyway, I've taken the cam carrier off the head and can't see any problem with the valve stems, caps or springs. The lobes on the cam also appear to be the right sort of shape.
On closer inspection of the tappets, two of the four appear to have a crack all the way round the side about 1mm down from the crown. If this is so I presume they won't hold oil pressure, and obviously then won't open the valves sufficiently to get any fuel air mixture in for the engine to run.
Has anyone else seen / experienced this ?

[Kevin Smith]

I bought two new hydraulic tappets from Northgate Alfa in Canterbury(UK) and fitted them, after doing the heating-up trick in a small oil bath (I used a small tin-can from which the tuna fish had been eaten, and thoroughly washing out! To heat the oil I carefully aimed a blowlamp as the base of the tin, although a hot-air stripper would probably have been safer)
Once I'd got the cylinder head refitted, along with the manifolds and carb etc I was able to get the engine running, but it didn't seem to be a lot better. I double checked the firing order and found that I'd got the plug leads crossed over on the right hand cylinders. It's been like that since June 2004, and has run (although not very well it must be said) Since swapping the leads back and getting some info off the Dellorto website I was able to get the carbs back into some sort of order and the engine runs much better, although it still doesn't pull as well as it did before it started playing up. I only have a two-leg manometer and have had to set up the carbs separately and then try to match left to right.
It's worth noting that the idle mixture start point given on the Dellorto website appears to be far too rich - I've closed the idle mixture screws down by two turns from their initial setting of 5turns out from closed.