Valve Clearance

[RichBinAZ]

It shows the basic workings of the engine. You made a comment earlier that you didn't know where the inlet and exhaust valves were. I thought this would help clear it up.
""Sooo.. in this picture, would the intake be the left or right?""
In the first picture up this thread all the inlets are along the top and the exhausts are along the bottom.
The exhaust manifold is under that aluminum thing with 2 bolts in it, often refered to as a heat shield. It's where the exhaust valves are....

Can you get your Dad to help you? Didn't you say he was a mechanic?

You can also learn a lot about an engine by building one of these... Google this -> visible v8 model
I thought revel made a 4 cylinder plastic turbo engine too, can't find it though

 

[CDsDontBurn]

I know how an engine works. I'm not mechanic myself, but after years of helping my dad work on cars while growing up and now working on my own cars, I know how to do many things myself and at the very minimum, the basic understandings of how various systems of a car work.

In relation to the inlet / exhaust valves, I just wasn't sure which set of valves were which for the J30A1 engine as after reading various sources of different J3X engines, some have the inlet on one side and exhaust on the other side. For example, one source I read said that on the J35 engine found in newer Odysseys, the intake valves were on the outside and exhaust valves were on the inside. That bit of info was from a Haynes manual I found while attempting to find out which were intake and exhaust valves for my Accord.