Topic: Rebuilt top end, significant ticking noise

[Skonnie Boy]

Rebuilt the top end some month or so back, new gaskets, valves lapped and new guides.  Sewed her back up and got a bit more valve (or top end) noise than before.  Thought it was just because I rounded off 3 of the 8 tappet covers, so the valve lash adjustment adjustment was not completed.  Upon replacing the last three, adjusting all valve tappets, the ticking is worse than before.  The tappets are all adjusted correctly, .02" and .03" for intake and exhaust.  Also adjusted camchain tensioner, again.

The rebuild seemed to go smoothly.  About the only thing I saw out of sorts was the chamshaft holder brackets were out of order.  Obviously, I put them in the correct order.  The sound became markedly worse upon readjusting all tappets.  I can't tell if the ticking is the valve face not seating correctly in the head (a whole other problem?) or if its the tappets or rocker arms.  Also not sure if a month of riding on less than perfect valve adjustments compounded the problem in some way.

I'll try to shoot some video of this with sound, but just thought I'd see if anyone is familiar with this scenario.  Thanks, all.

[Skonnie Boy]

For the sake of posterity and future sohc4ers using the search feature, I'll explain what happened and how I screwed up.

The ticking noise was made much worse by a horribly misadjusted tappet.  How did this tappet become horribly misadjusted when I claimed that I just "fixed" them?  Well, I lost track of whether I was adjusting cylinder 1 or 4.  Someone called in the middle of doing all this, and I failed to doublecheck that I was in fact adjusting the correct, i.e. loose tappet that supposed to be TDOC.  I guess the lesson is, don't wrench when you're running late to work.  Or don't have a job, one of the two.

Another lesson would be to never tighten tappet covers too much.  Since I'd just replaced mine, I was able to remove them at work with small crescent wrench.  In fact, the whole fix involved a small crescent wrench I found lying around and a box cutter blade as a screwdriver.  Take that, MacGuyver.

There you go, Future People and 22 people who read this.  Keep your tappets in shape.  Don't do drugs, stay in school.