Is this engine tick anything to worry about?

[MADMarc]

Aaaalright, a little back story to begin. My car has ran for maaaaaybe ten minutes in the past few months. Over the last couple of weeks I have done a ton of work to it: swapped valve cover gaskets, oil feed and drain gaskets, water housing gaskets, cam end caps, new trans, new tcase, new clutch, precat eliminators, DNP preturbo intake pipes, more gaskets, clutch assist delete, new calipers, yadda yadda. I finally got everything back together and the last thing I need to do before driving it is adjust the clutch pedal.

Soooo, with the car still on stands I fired it up because it's been so long. All of my fluids are at good levels. I started it and heard some pretty loud ticking coming from the rear valve cover. My initial thought is lifter tick but I have the 99 lifters. I got a pipe to try and centralize the noise and it wasn't an exhaust leak, the intake manifold sounded good too but when I put the pipe to the rear valve cover the noise became much more prominent. After letting the car warm up the ticking became MUCH quieter but was still there. I only let the car run for maybe a couple minutes after it warmed up. Might it just be that since the car sat so long it is just relubricating everything? That would explain why it got quieter. I experienced a noise similar to this in the past, however, and it turned out to be my timing belt tensioner. With this in mind I put the pipe to the timing covers and the noise didn't seem to be coming from there.

What do you guys think? Is this anything to worry about? Should I let the car run for a bit and see if it goes away? Do I need to pull the timing covers and check for belt slack (just thought of that now and think I might do it anyways tomorrow)? Oooooor, bummer of an idea that this is, do I need to get back inside the rear head and look at, um, I really wouldn't know how to look for a noise w/o being able to listen for it. I guess I could check for damage but everything looked great when I had the valve cover off earlier today. Ahhhh, and oil pressure was great.

[dpartinvr4]

sounds like lifter tick man, you might not have let the car warm up enough to get the oil to thicken up and stop the noise completely?

[MADMarc]

Very possible. Water temp was at operating temp but I don't know where oil temp was.

[MADMarc]

Disregard! Just sat in it (couldn't go anywhere because I'm still on jacks) and ran it up for about ten minutes. Mmmmmmmm it's nice. The ticking went away almost entirely and I couldn't hear it in the cab anymore. Thanks for the response!

[dpartinvr4]

NP... get her done man