[KTL]

Nope you can't flip a rocker arm around to combat noise or wear. It can only be installed in one direction. And swapping rockers around on the engine is foolish because you're mixing up wear patterns between the cam lobe and the rocker pad.

Speaking of wear patterns, i'm of the opinion that a lot of folks complain about improperly refinished rockers by their own fault. They do a good thing by having their rockers reconditioned, but they decide to leave the cams as-is in their worn/looks-good-to-the-naked-eye condition. I'm not saying the cams are necessarily bad. Just saying that you shouldn't refinish one surface and not the other. When they see uneven wear on their "new" rockers? They assume the shop who reconditioned them didn't do it right.

I think a lot of the valvetrain noise people experience after adjusting the valves is due to adjustment error. The error they make is being too deliberate in following the often recommended description of "light drag" on of the feeler gauge. You usually have to bend the feeler gauge to get it in the cam housing and wiggle it in between the valve and the foot. That slightly bent feeler gauge is automatically going to add some light drag to the feeling of the clearance and therefore make the gap much larger than desired. I think the sensation of drag needs to be recognized as being much more firm in order to get a good clearance measurement with the bent feeler gauge.