I've scratched my head 'til it hurts over this one... hope someone has seen this before and can point me in the right direction.
Prior to rebuilding the 454 in my 73, it had random valvetrain noise that I attributed to wear. The noise occurred at startup and after hard driving, or in hot weather, normal driving.
After the rebuild, the noise was back and I'm down to the bottom of my bag of tricks to fix it.

The rebuild included bore/hone +.030, new cam and full valvetrain (510/510 w/ 228*@.050,pretty mild) from Wolverine w/ lifters and double springs. Heads got new valves, new guides, and surfacing. Oil pump is a Melling hi-presure, not hi-vol.
Oil pres. is good (70 cold above idle, 55-60 hot above idle, 35-40 hot at idle), and I know cam bearings and oil gallery plugs are installed correctly.
After the rebuild, the noise was louder than before, and in the first 200 miles, 3 or 4 of the GMPP 3/8 pushrods disintegrated at the lifter end. A couple of rockers also punched thru, so I changed back to the stock springs.. probably didn't need the double springs that came in the Wolverine kit with this cam, anyway. Since then, the noise has not been severe, but is annoying and probably causing wear, etc. and no more part breakage.

Also, I noticed while priming the oil pump for the initial start after rebuild that some of the rockers weren't getting oil until I primed for ~5 mins. and that there seemed to be a lot of oil coming out around the top of the lifter bores on some valves. Is it possible that the lifter bores are worn and out of round? The car may have had a hi-lift cam in the past ( I know it had headers at some time and the intake and carb are original type, but not the parts GM put on the car). Is it possible that a big cam would wear the lifter bores and they need to be bushed? Any other thoughts?

 

relatively speaking...that's not that big a cam...
I assume you have new lifters, and it's a hydraulic cam...could be you don't have the proper lash, could be some collapsed lifters, could be lifter bores are out of round, could be one or more pushrods are slightly bent..could be one or more lobes are worn...

 

Most performance camshafts are not as easy as a drop in installation. Many require additional head work of cutting the guides down to allow clearance between the valve guides and valve spring retainers so as not to bottom out from the higher lift cam. Valve spring coil bind is another critical area. Failure to check these can result in bent pushrods and broken rocker arms as the clearances go past zero.

 

Takes a good 5 to 10 minutes with the drill to get oil coming out all 8 pushrods on my small block.

 

I don't know about the lifter bores but it would bother me that a few pushrods disintergrated. Did you assemble the heads? Did you check everything?? If you did the work you know what you did. Tomorrow I could post on a way to check for proper clearance, I did run a post on this a while ago.
Anyway if you didn't assemble the heads it is of no use for me to explain the procedure for assemblying heads but if you did I could run through it to see if you missed a step.
Hopefully the ticking is not the retainer kissing the oil seal or the guide. Of coarse the valve springs are not bottoming but you do have punched out rockers??
Priming?? Oil does seem slow to some rockers and faster to others. This is normal.

 

Thanks for the replies, guys. I'm obviously new to the forum and am glad to be able to pose this problem to such an experienced group.

GDaina... No, the cam I have in there is not big for a BBC, but the car may have had a big cam in a previous lifetime. I took out a non-original .440 lift (stock-spec) cam when I rebuilt it.... so this may be the 4th or 5th cam that has been in this engine.
Yes, the lifters were new hydraulic, and I replaced them again, suspecting the first set may have been some type of high-bleed lifters. I've adjusted the lash numerous times using different methods, and am convinced that the lash is not the problem. The pushrods were new GMPP parts and after some broke, I replaced them with Comp Cams hardened rods, and haven't seen any more breakage in 3K miles.... just the lifter noise. I have dial-indicated the lifter travel a couple of times during the process and all were good each time. Back to the lifter bores, have you ever heard of people needing to bore and sleeve them? GMPP offers replacement sleeves, but I don't know if they're intended for the absolute perfectionist race builder who doesn't trust the factory machining on new blocks, or if they wear a lot with high lift cams and need to be reapired.

Ironcross... Correct me if I'm making the wrong assumptions, but .510 lift shouldn't get me into interference trouble with coil bind using stock springs. I measured the clearance between the retainers and valve guides when I put it together and I had a mile of clearance there. I'm using the stock umbrella seals and I was worried about pinching them between the guide and retainer and destroying them. I'll double check the coil clearances, though.

Fevre... Thanks for that input. It seemed like a really long time, especially wwhen some of them oiled up in 30 seconds - 1 minute.