Ok...bear with me here. My boyfriend has a 1977 Chevy Silverado C-10 350 small block...I'm pretty sure that's right.
Well a seal was broken on his air intake manifold and oil was coming out so he replaced it today. Afterwards he started it and it wouldn't spark. So he kept trying to start it and trying to figure out solutions to it. Eventually he figured out that it was just the distributer and repositioned it and it started up just fine.
Then it started leaking anti freeze out the bottom and he found that the radiator was all rusted and needed replaced.
So we had to drive it home (we were at someone else's house). Because it was holding enough anti freeze that we could make it home with maybe only one stop in between to fill it back up.
Then on the way home his engine got a tick. And when he revs it over 2500 rpms(I think that's right) you can begin to hear the pistons and everything hitting each other. He does have oil pressure and the truck isn't over heating or anything...what could be the problem? Any advice would be great. If you need any more details just ask.

 

Well.....if he figured it was the distributor that was the reason why it wouldnt start then it would make sense that the timing is off...I would venture to guess that when he set it at your friends house that he didnt get the distributor tight and it went back out of time, causing a spark knock (tick as you put it) I would reset the timing by bringing the #1 piston to TDC after the intake stroke and setting the distributor to the #1 wire and fine tune from there......hope this helps

 

Yeah the timing had to of jumped.

 

I agree this could be the classic issue with the timing. A friend of mine has this issue before and all we did was to check the 1 and 3 pistons as this is normally where the problem lies. I might give chrisbmo2000's solution a try as this is similar to what we did. That was three months ago and I have not heard any complaints from him until now. By the way it was Chevrolet's Suburban model GZ8960. Not sure if this is a common issue with Chevrolet cars.