33 Coupe Adjusting and Tweaking 3        4/19/06

I've been driving the car every chance I can get these days and one of the things that needs to be done now is to adjust the valves. Adjusting the valves is really no big deal but being able to do it without anyone else's help is what I'm after. What I mean is, some people have a second person sit inside the car and bump the key a few times so the engine turns a small amount placing the valves in the right position. While this method will work okay, I'm just not one of those people that want to do it this way. I want to be able to hook my "starter button" up to the starter and push "it" to bump the engine over. 

The reason I'm talking about all this is because when I was building the car, I didn't take into account hooking up my starter button up to anything. I adjusted the valves two times before the car was done. The first time was when the engine was in the car without a front-end on it. I turned the engine over by using a custom crank wrench that I made along with a breaker-bar. The second time was when I had the motor out for paint and it was on the engine stand. 

A starter button is very simple to use and hookup. One clamp goes on the battery cable (on the starter) and the other one goes to the purple wire on the starter. Some people will remember sticking a screwdriver between these two terminals to engage the starter but you don't want to do that very many times. Now this sounds very simple and it is, but my purple wire is hidden under the starter and I can't get the clamp on it. What I needed was an easy way to attach the starter button clamp to the small purple wire without it touching anything else. If the clamp moved at all, it would short out because everything around it is grounded.
  

 

 
If you look below, you can see down between the headers, there is a nut that holds my battery cable to a copper extension that in turn runs down to my starter. Attaching a clamp to this cable is no problem because I can put the clamp right on the copper collar that is on the end of the battery cable. The problem lies farther down below all this where the purple wire is hidden from view. I can't even see it from here so I need a way to get at it easier.
 

 

 
Here is a close-up of the same area to give you a better idea of what I'm dealing with. The clamp will be easy to attach to the battery cable but not the other smaller terminal. I need a way to clamp the other end of the starter button but not have it touch anything else in the process. 
 

 

 
What I came up with is to use a longer screw in place of the stock one. This way I could reach down between the headers and attach the clamp to this screw and be good to go. I used two nuts to hold the screw on, one is to hold the purple wire on and the other is to hold the screw to the starter.

The reason I used two screws is because the new one is an 8-32 and the one that came with the starter was metric. The metric screw was slightly larger than my new screw which meant the new screw slipped through the existing hole and needed to be double-nutted to hold it in place. Whatever works you know!
 

 

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