OK, so I am in need of some help from the community.

I have a 98 4runner with a 5VZ and 135k miles. Over the past year I have what sounds to be a loud valve tick. The noise has slowly gotten worse and I cannot find the problem.

Based on the tone and frequency I'm very confident that it is a valve tick. The tick is from the pass side valve cover. I've had both valve covers off twice and all the valves are within the Toyota specification (following the repair manual for inspection procedure).

I’m just wondering if there are others out there that have had this same problem and how they fixed it? At this point I'm at a loss and cannot stand listening to the noise anymore.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

 

A friend of mine thought he had a valve tick. It turned out to be a loose sparkplug. He pulled it out and did the tap/re-thread thing. All is good now.

 

Auto or manual transmission? Does it go at idle or higher rpm's or constant? Thought my ticking was valve related ended up being a severely cracked flex plate. My ticking went away as soon as I loaded the torque converter and came back while idling or coasting.

If it is an auto easy check is to have the engine running and in park and pull on the transmission kick down cable and see if the ticking goes away. if it does it's the flex plate. Not fun.

 

What weight and brand of oil are you currently using?

Retorque the spark plugs to 13ft/lbs on a cold engine and see what happens as Gerado said.

 

I'll check the spark plugs tonight.

The tick is changes frequency with higher RPMs but does not go away.

Currently I'm using 10w30 Valvoline (dino) and I have an auto trans.

Thanks for the suggestions. Hope to hear more opinions from others too.

 

I think the oil and weight being used is fine.

It may be a failing injector. I have never had one go on a Toyota but had one on a older Nissan that sounded like a bad valve. Some injector cleaner helped as a temporary fix but only a new one fixed it.

Maybe a bad lifter. Run a compression test for each cylinder to gauge the health of the engine.

 

Special thanks out to Gerdo. When you mentioned spark plug, I remembered seeing some carbon build up around the #2 plug hole on the valve cover. Turns out the plug was loose. Tightened the plug and cleaned up the carbon, problem solved. Thanks again.