I've always done mine after the car is hot as that's how the car will be running most of the time and I suspect the engine internals stay warmish enough for a long enough period of time to complete the job.

Yes you should be relatively quick but don't forget as soon as you tighten the bolts I've noticed that the gap becomes smaller and therefore you want the feel guage to slip in nicely when you haven't tightened so that when you tighten them you get that nice bit of resistance. It should be just a tad of pull on the feeler guage. IMHO.

Mines due for this soon as I said in another post there's a few things I would like to do to get my baby running A1 or A+ as it were.

Arn't you glad you don't have a twin cam engine now?:classic:

I was told to measure at the valve. More accurate. So I measured .08 at the valve, when I checked the measurement at the cam it was .06. Can someone explain that???