I thought I had timing chain tapping but some people think it is piston slap.
Can someone describe the sound and tell me if it would go away after engine warmup.

 

Use the search function above and you will find lots of info.

 

Sounds like a knock, and yes it goes away after its warmed up

 

The classic term is used to discribe a piston who's skirt clearence is excessive.
As the piston rocks in it's bore a low frquency dead type bang is heard between the piston and the block bore up near top dead center on the compression/firing stroke.
If the piston expands with warm-up, the noise often goes away or reduces in extreme cases.
The classic ways to check for this is to kill the spark on each cylinder until you hear the noise quite noticeably change, identifying a cylinder/s that has this condition.
Disabling the injectors one at a time should result in the same action.
Each of these reduces the cylinder pressure, changing the effects on the piston action.
Be awhere that an excessive rod bearing clearence can sound much the same but does not go away and sounds off under low speed high loading, even more.
A main bearing knock is also much the same but the order in which it makes the sounds are different yet. It's closer to a dead rattle from low oil pressure or excessive clearence.
Worn wrist pins will id the same way but doesn't sound quite the same because of their location in the scheme of things.
Extreme spark knock on one cylinder under heavey load will often be mistaken for piston slap but the sound is easy to relate to driving conditions only.
This all takes experience and understanding to relate to the way the noise presents it'self, when and how.
To many people 'say' piston knock without any real diagnostic proof. No clicking, no grinding, no tapping, no timing chain slap sounds like it unless there is more than one condition present at the same time.
Different engine designs will influence how the variations of sounds are heard.
Hope you can see all the differences as explained.

 

I think my problem is the timing chain tensor on the right side of the engine. I replaced the chains tensors and guides and the noise is exactly the same, but that is definately where the noise is coming from. I think there is a blockage in the head that won,t allow the tensor on the right side to function properly at startup. I have a thread on this page called "timing chain noise at startup please help " where I describe all the symptoms.

 

The tensioner is a small piston assembly that depends on oil pressure for taking up chain slack. If oil pressure is low or slow to build it could present a noise problem.
On the small 2.9 v6 engines of old and other such engines, they use the same method to tension cam timing chain.