[Citroënbender]

The retainer yoke pivots on a ball profile cast into the cam cover, unfortunately that pretty much excludes the possibility of something like you suggest.

A saving grace in the whole issue is that very slight misalignment is unlikely to be a problem, because of how the yoke pivots on the ball profile. Car is now in a shop parking bay and owner isn’t pushing us, so if it takes a fortnight to resolve economically that’s not a headache. Also we haven’t had to even crack the cooling system with this approach, only fluids drained are from the diesel filter forwards.