it for the rest of the procedure now everybody knows things are always better with mods so it's time to mod out our dial indicator with this extended tip set that i bought and you're going to want to find the absolute longest skinniest tips you can get because there is almost no room to take these measurements and in jaffra's video he actually has quite a bit of room because the head design is different from the miata but you're gonna see in just a second how little real estate you have to get this tip in the right area so i went ahead and installed this tip and then got the dial indicator set up on the engine so this needs to be set up in such a way that it's going to measure the valve travel by sitting on top of the lifter and the best way i found to do this is to get the tip of that needle on the actual edge of the lifter so it's not going to sit on the shim but on the edge of the lifter itself watch out for that little groove that the lifters have in them and it's also very important that the angle of the dial indicator matches the angle of the valve as closely as possible to give you accurate measurements all right we are ready to take a ton of measurements now you need to make sure your dial indicator is very stable luckily on the exhaust side the engine lift hook is a perfect place to put a magnetic base for a dial indicator and for an example here i'm going to put the engine at top dead center and the method used for determining piston to valve clearance at that engine angle is you simply push down the valve until it actually contacts the piston and then write down your measurement from the dial indicator and that's how much clearance there was between the valve and the piston at that engine angle and i'll take that measurement every two degrees from NUMBER_TOKEN degrees before top dead center all the way until NUMBER_TOKEN degrees after top dead center because that's the general area in which the valves are closest to the pistons i'll repeat that on both the intake and exhaust cams and since i have a vvt engine i have to figure out how to take all those measurements also at various vvt angles which i'll get into a little bit later in the video over on the intake side unfortunately there's not really a great place to put the dial indicator so i had to get a little creative and what i did here is just clamp my vise to one of the intake manifold studs don't worry it's not clamp onto the threads it's not going to hurt anything and now i have a big solid steel base to mount my magnetic dial indicator and i can start taking those measurements on the intake side as well another thing you can use your dial indicator for is to check out the max lift of the cam so let's check out this vvt intake cam since there's a little bit of mixed information online about the specs so all you do is place your dial indicator at the lowest part of the base circle or opposite of the lobe peak zero it out and then spin it all the way around to the peak of that lobe and you can see the lift on the cam is NUMBER_TOKEN millimeters i didn't know this off the top of my head but that is actually the highest lift cam out of all miata engines another thing you can do with this setup is fully map out a cam
NO_SEGMENT_TOKEN