I swapped out the oiler tubes. All the plastic ones were still intact. I also replaced the upper timing chain guides on the passenger side since they were broken and I was right there.
No difference. It's fairly quiet when it's cold, but as it warms up it gets pretty loud. I took it for a short drive. The car has plenty of power. It surges just a bit at idle, but I haven't touched the ignition yet, so I assume it needs everything. The wiring harness is also toast, so who knows what problems that could be introducing. The two mile loop I ran did nothing for the valve noise. I'd love to take it out and give it a full shakedown, but still no registration or insurance, so I have to stay close to home.
I got out the stethoscope and poked around. It sounds like it's centered around one of the intake valves on cylinder 7. My best guess at this point is a collapsed lifter. I did inspect the cams when I had it apart and didn't see any obvious issues there. No flat lobes or anything.
I have plenty of lifters sitting around, so I could easily swap some in. I'd rather keep the original lifter on the original cam lobe if possible though. Are these lifters serviceable? I seem to recall it was possible to disassemble and clean them up. I'll do some searching around on that.
Another option would be to go ahead and swap in the set of 92 intake cams I've been hanging onto. Those are good for an extra half millimeter or so of lift and I think just a bit more duration. I have the matching lifters for that cam, organized and labeled by location. I could swap that whole mess in. This engine needs chain guides anyway, so it's not much more work to just swap the intake cams while I'm at it.
Of course, I've been wanting to try swapping a set of intake cams in place of exhaust cams at some point too. This is probably my best opportunity for that, since this car is so much easier to work on than the 400E.
My only hesitation is that if I try to do all those things at once, it would be hard to troubleshoot if anything went wrong. I'd rather do it one step at a time, but that's a lot more work.
I'm not even supposed to be here working on this car today.