I just solved my ticking on the passenger side when i found a hugh exhaust leak. Now the only noise is from the 2nd back drivers side valve cover. It makes a real load ticking sound. It gets a little softer once the car warms up but can be heard almost always. There is no sound coming from anywhere but this spot and i can hear it over very load exhaust. The car is factory origional and nothing under the valve cover has ever been touched. What could be wrong and how would i go about fixing it? I put a stechoscope on the 8 rockers and can hear only faint sounds but the one is 10X as loud.

 

One of two things most probable with that. First, a rocker that is out of adjustment. Second, a busted lifter. Adjusting the rocker is simple, just do a search to see the different ways to do that. Replacing the lifter will take a little time but isn't extremely hard either. It just involves taking off the intake manifold.

 

How do you check for a busted lifter?

 

I'd just try adjusting your rocker arm where the noise is comming from. If the ticking stops great...if not you probably have a bad lifter. If you can't tell exactly where the noise is coming from, you can take off your valve cover and run the engine at idle to get a better look and listen what's going on. If you let the car run for a while you will get a little bit of oil spirting out but nothing that a small rag won't take care of. I'd do a search for rocker arm adjustment though and see which method you feel most comfortable with because there are many ways to adjust them, all doing the same in the end. Good luck.

 

i had the same problem, come to find out mine was a wore lifter and it wore down the cam lobe as well. I think part of my problem, the guy who had the car before me didnt konw what he was doing when he adjusted the valves. I got the car it would miss bad on the top end. I adjusted all the vavles and they were tight as hell, to get them to click i had to back them off almost 2 full rotations. Run good after i did that, except for that one lifter. it made some noise still, so i pretty much knew what had happend. I tore the motor down last week, sure enough lifter fact was heavily pitted and the cam lobe was wore down 1/8 inch on the top. this was a lt1 as well.

 

Same problem as mine on the #1 cylinder at 100,000 miles. No one ever adjusted the valves so it wasn't a misadjustment. I replaced the cam and lifters and got another 223,000 miles out of it so I believe it was either a defective lifter or cam. It is alot of work to replace these in the car.