Engine builders/Gurus, I need your help.

I don't believe it's bottom end noise, and here's why, though I could still be totally wrong. This engine was not a fresh build. All we did was upgrade the intake, cam, heads, and valvetrain. The engine was in perfect working order before we did the upgrade, but we noticed the tick right away after idling the the motor down after cam break-in. At first we thought it was just a lifter that wouldn't pump up but it never went away.

One thing to note is that we did check the piston to valve clearance and there they're not even close to hitting each other. The pistons are way down in the hole. Also, when we removed the heads to clearance them for the pushrods, we checked inside the bores and saw nothing that would throw up a flag.

We are pretty certain the cam lobe isn't wiped. As I mentioned in the first post we tried swapping the lifters and the ones we took out looked great.

We also don't believe it's a torque converter bolt. The tick would be much faster wouldn't it?