Heard it was common for the top end of the SOHC engines to be kinda noisy, but is it normal for the rocker arms to be? It has a sorta ticking noise going on. My '05 Neon is running 5w20 as it was rated, but I saw all previous years of the 2nd gen ran with 5w30 instead. Would that possibly quiet down the noise some if at all?


Also running 87 octane non-ethanol gas. Someone mentioned it might help running 89 octane but I wasn't sure about that. Has no muffler either because of course it doesn't lmao, though it's always had the noise even before that.

Car has almost 171,000 miles on it as of posting.
Doesn't seem to be hurting anything, just kinda noisy.

 

I've heard some with that ticking noise in the top end. Can't say it's good or bad though. Depends why it's ticking I suppose.

 

It could be this: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/vi...07-04-ertyuorg

You can fix it, but it's not causing a lot of harm just to leave it.

 

Thanks for the info, just gonna ignore the noise for now. If anything funny starts happening over the next few thousand miles I'll look into a bit more.