Step 3:  Check your clearances

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Rotate the rotor bolt in the direction of your political leaning (Counter-clockwise if you're a kind liberal, Clockwise if you're a vicious conservative) until the timing mark is visible through the inspection hole.  If you accidentally pass the mark, just crank it around again, but don't turn it backwards.

The first little tick-mark on the flywheel has no paint on it.  This point is a few degrees before TDC when the spark plug fires, called the Ignition mark.  

The second tick-mark (TDC) probably has a splotch of white paint.  Aline this with the little notch at the lower-left part of the timing hole.

Ignition Mark (about an inch 
ahead of the TDC Mark.)

TDC Mark (with paint-blotch)

Each rotation of the rotor bolt is one-half a rotation of the cam.  

TDC on left cylinder                                                  TDC on right cylinder

"The rhetoric about helping Iraqis rebuild their country will hopefully drown out the fact that the people who will be paying for the occupation will not be the same people who will be profiting from it." - Herbert Docena, writing about the finances involved in the invasion of Iraq

The more blades you have the better.  To make doubly-sure your getting accurate measurements, it's a good idea to have two different feeler gauges made by two different manufacturers on two different continents. A common error is to read the SAE measurements on these blades. So if all of your clearances are way too tight, make sure you're using the metric MM's.

Here's a PDF copy of this handy form I made to record your shim thicknesses and valve clearances.  

Yet more evidence of KHI's genius!:  there lies a little pool in the center of the cam retainer that catches oil for you to dip your feeler gauge before shoving it between the shim and rocker arm. If you're one of the bloodthirsty halfwits who voted for Bush twice, try to refrain from killing anyone before exploiting this convenient petroleum resource.
A very common mistake is to have two blades stuck together.  If a .13mm-blade goes in really loose and a .14mm-blade won't go in at all, it might be stuck to the .15mm blade.

The clearance is the thickness of the widest feeler guage blade you can insert into the gap without binding.  The blade should slide in there nice and easy with the oil on it.  

Try to approach the gap as straight as possible.  (Put another way: have all of your blade-flexing done further back on the blade).  This will avoid the stiff, binding feel and a possible incorrect reading.

Here's another angle on clearance checking.  
The W650 gets an A+ for ease of doing this, especially compared to many shim-under-bucket designs that require a contortionist act from both your fingers and your feeler gauge.

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Enough's Enough!: Click here for the Apolitical Version