Ok, so today, after a few days of troubleshooting, I finally figured out the issue with my 'lifter tick' noise. The rear (larger of the two) oil jets in the deck on the driver's side was stuck. There is a checkball in it, and through the time it sat during my rebuild, it was stuck. So I was looking at pulling the motor again starting tomorrow! AAAaaahhhh. So I started playing around. I pulled the head bolt that the oil uses to get from the block to the orifices for the lifters/cams. Then I poured some Seafoam in it and left it for 30 minutes. NOTHING! Argh again. Then I had the thought. You can't blow air down because that just seats the ball better. But what if I can create a good enough vacuum. So I started looking around at what I had that fit the hole. You have to be able to get about 1.5-2 inches down to seal past the orifices. So this is what I came up with!
You are looking at some old vacuum hose off the car that ran to the boost controller, and a hard pipe that I removed through one of the many deletes. The hard pipe has a flared end which made it perfect to make sure I could pull the vacuum line back out. Then the other end, I put some more vacuum line and attached it to my brake vacuum bleeder.
I pumped it to 25lbs of vacuum and let it sit for about 10 minutes after laying hands on the motor and rebuking the demons out of it

. When it got down to around 15 lbs, the seal wasn't as strong, so I had to pump it back up. Got it back to 25 and it wasn't budging. I unplugged the bleeder and blew some air down the hose, then reconnected the vacuum bleeder. To my amazement, I COULDN'T GET A VACUUM. Had my wife turn the car over, and sure enough... LET THRE BE OIL!!
WOOOOOO. So tomorrow putting it back together and will finally be at the point where I'm not embarrassed by the clatter and will post the first running vid on my build thread.