OK guys, so today I decided to tackle my first (ever) valve adjustment on my new to me 911. Car was making some valve noise, didn't know when the last one was performed, so I got to it. Looked up a bunch of different write-ups, felt pretty confident. Drained the oil, got access to the valve covers, took all the valve covers off. While I'm pulling the old gasket off the left bank intake, a part rolls out of the number two cylinder intake. It's a sheared rod of some kind, with an allen adjuster threaded at the end of it. However, when I found it, the allen key was in the wrong orientation, facing away from threads as in picture.
Picture here.
So I tried to figure out where it came from. I can see three parts like it, but I cannot see anywhere obvious that this one came from. Picture here.
So my questions are these:
1) What is it that fell out?
2) Did this break, or did some prior mechanic leave it in there?
3) If it did break, what now? Did I just get myself into a rebuild situation?
Thanks so much for your responses!