Rebuit engine getting valve noise. checked clearances some tight some loose. Now when i remove bucket and look in with a flashlight at the valve springs i can see where the bottom of the buckets are coming into contact with the head. could this be where this valve noise is coming from? I notice its happening on some of the bucket places but not all. Could i grind down the bottom of the buckets and fix this issue? its a 2001 corolla. this doesnt seem to be a valve clearances issue but a issue of the buckets being too long and bottoming out the they are at there lowest point.
Generally they don't recommend grinding or modifying the buckets - those are heat treated to a certain hardness, altering them could cause more trouble than not.
What some people do is pull the offending bucket out and see if they can swap it for another that is too tight or too loose. Otherwise, just need to pickup a new one at the dealership - thy have a number of different thicknesses to makeup what you need.
Do you know how they rebuilt the engine? Where the parts came from? The 1ZZ-FE is pretty picky on how it gets rebuilt. Especially with cleaning up the valve seats (factory recommends NOT to clean that up with anything that will cut the metal) or shaving the head to re-deck it (factory recommends to replace the head, no machining if warped at all).
I also forgot to ask if you are running the stock cams or running and aftermarket with a little more lift/duration. Shouldn't affect the car that much - as I've seen some people run a pretty radical cam on the 1ZZ-FE. But if the shop did some weird machining or tried to screw with the valves - that could be part of the issue at hand.
Unfortunately, there aren't too many experts in the 1ZZ-FE realm. Monkey Wrench Racing is one of the few - but they usually deal with the Celica GT/MR-S 1ZZ-FE variant and especially the 2ZZ-GE engines. Might be worth a call to Matt at MWR and see what he says.
