KDP? Might be laying in the gears
 

Picked up a 95 5 speed, 119,000 miles for a friend of mine yesterday, cheap because it has a noise in the engine. The noise scared me enough that I didn't want to drive it on the trailer, but I didn't have mine with the winch so I had no choice.

It sounds just like a tight roller chain jumping the sprockets under alot of torque. You could feel it in the floor and everything.
Something else that bothers me is the timing gear housing has no paint on it and the engine tags are not pinned on like they're supposed to be. Also missing bolts on the cover so someone was definitely in there.

If everything checks out ok under the cover, where else should I be looking for this noise?

Thanks

can you tell if its on the upper or lower end. does it increase with rpm or about half as fast

I only ran it enough to get it on the trailer, no troubleshooting yet. Neither of us will start it again till we've checked it out first.

Pull the valve cover and start there

Thats where we're going to start, valve covers first and then pull the timing cover to kill the dowel pin if it hasn't already been done. And see what else they forgot, darn thing is missing bolts on the timing cover, so who knows about the inside.

Found it, #3 exhaust push rod top fell off and wasn't opening the exhaust valve right, also bent the intake push rod a little bit. By buddy is going to pull the push rods out of a core engine before it goes back next week.

Also pulled the front cover, definitely a new cover, has the captured dowel pin. Every bolt on the outside was loose, no wonder there was oil everywhere. One of us will check the housing bolts this weekend, they're probably loose too.