Long story short , car had very loud ticking.
I had great oil pressure on a mechanical gauge. So I tore off the cam tower to change my oil ring , it wasn't bad so I took the cam out to check the oil passages and there was a big ol chunk off rubber or cured black rtv in in it. I have picture but I'm not sure how upload here from my phone.

So considering the car was driven a 1000+ miles with no oil to the lifters. Should I replace them before I button it back up? How should they fell when I squeeze them?

 

 

Solved! I finally got it back together and the driver side is absolutely silent. The only issue is without the previous extremely loud ticking I can hear the passenger side ticks now. So I gotta take off the passenger side cam tower and look it over.

Edited May 28, 201411 yr by chaseman

Picture of crud in cam tower oil passage

Kind of looks like you got grass growing in there too or weird spiders.

Oh yeah , it's really windy and in the 20 minutes it was lying outside stuff blew in.

Hydraulic lifters are supposed to be rock hard with very little compression when recently removed from engine.

Right but these would have had no oil pressure to them. They wouldn't have had a chance to properly pump up ever. Is there a way to bench test them?