Hey, its great to hear that my website lives on and that my tool design may help someone. I have now used that compressor to remove and replace all the valves on a head. If you have improvements to the tool, I'd be interested in hearing them. Its basic, yes, but it works quite perfectly, I can assure you. Also, I would suggest not using cotton rope, but a nylon rope to fill the cylinders. the cotton will leave residue in the cylinder chamber, which is bad. Not generally horrible as it will probably burn off, but you generally don't want bonus crap hanging out in your cylinder chambers (thus air filters). Anyways, good luck to you and to Zach in future endeavors. it really is quite easy to do all this. Oh yes, on final thing--TDC is really not helpful for this project, because you have to raise the piston up to compress the rope and hold the valve up on whichever cylinder you are working on. Be sure you can find TDC to reset the timing belt, but you won't be keeping it there. You definitely cannot push enough rope in there to really hold the valve up without compressing the piston a bit. good luck,

Nate Gundy
--
'86 240DL sedan, 260K miles, M46, K cam, 25/23mm sways, 260 front and wagon rear springs; http://valvespringcompressor.weblogs.us/