Nuke

I bought my 92 2wd pickup about a month ago and soon discovered it had an oil leak. I determined it was from the fronts seal and replaced the seal after wrestling with a stripped crank bolt for a week. When I had it in my garage, I took the valve cover off to inspect the timing chain guides and did not see anything that would concern me. Not knowing any better, I tightened the valve cover too much and had the clicking noise. After a search on this site, I discovered my error, loosened the bolts, and the noise went away.

After that, I was driving at about 70 mph and hear just a horrible noise. It is what I would think a slapping chain would sound like. This noise was not there before. It would go aware by reducing the rpms but would come back when higher rpms were reached but not all the time. It has since gotten more consistant and I've stopped driving it. Last time I did, I was able to pull over and listen for the noise--it seemed to be coming from the top front of the valve cover. I got home by shifting early to avoid the higher rpms and when I did heard the noise, I reduced the engine speed.

I've read the many timing chain threads here and have built up the confidence to do this job myself. Tonight or tomorrow, I will again remove valve cover to inspect again but I think in any case, I will be replacing the timing chain. A few questions:

1) Could it be something else? This problem started after I replaced the front seal and over torqued the valve cover.

2) Should I replace the head gasket? The truck has 222k miles and I don't think it has been replaced. I was hoping to avoid pulling the head but it just seams to make sense to go ahead and do it.

3) Anything else I should replace besides the guides, tensioner, chain, and sprockets?

Kaptain

You may still have your valve cover too tight; the noise you are hearing is not typical of a timing chain issue. As a reference I tighten the valve cover nuts\grommets without a ratchet (with just my hands I use a sockets and a long extension to snug it up). It doesn't need to be tight by any means.

Typically you will hear a diesel type noise during idle, this is because the chain isn't under load which allows it to 'slap' the guides and or timing cover. Next time you pull the valve cover see if you can pick up on the chain on the cam gear, if you can then it's definitely stretched out.

Nuke

Had to wait to the weekend to get the valve cover off. On the cover, there are marks from the timing chain from having it on too tight. Frustrating in that the FSM and the Haynes manual had no torque spec or warning about this. I cough this up to learning experience.