I’ll put my questions at the top so I don’t force you to read a wall of text first.

I’m afraid that owning a VE today is just not feasible, it seems that rebuild VTCs only last a couple thousand miles at best, and the proper rebuild kits are long and gone. That being said I have some questions, and also the details of my rebuild and specific problems if you’re inclined to read it and give me some pointers.

1. Has anyone performed a proper VTC delete?

2. Should I give up on the VE and just swap a VG into it? The VG doesn’t have an ancient form of variable valve control so the future for this engine seems a lot more optimistic than it’s VE counterpart.

3. Does anyone have some working VTCs that they can sell me? I’ll also be willing to buy the proper 2.8” springs and the sprockets. I’d like to get this car on the road ASAP so I can get a summer job and swap a VG into this car before the summer ends.

Here’s the wall of text I mentioned earlier. I’ll post some videos later so you can hear the clacking. I’m currently sitting on a 93 SE that I bought a year ago. It had a nasty knock when turning the engine over and there was no compression in three of the cylinders so we pulled the engine out and started a full rebuild. We replaced and lapped the bent valves, cleaned the lash adjusters, reset the timing and closed her up (with new gaskets of course).
When we first started her up, we had some pretty bad clacking, which we first attributed to the lash adjusters because we didn’t fill them with oil before starting the engine. We also found two dead injectors. Yesterday we filled the lash adjusters with oil and replaced one of the two dead injectors. And the engine started up and was able to take me on a couple drives around the neighborhood. The car ran well even though it was super loud (we believe it to be VTC clacking and some chain tensioner noise.) Today my dad was driving the car and said one of the VTC assemblies self destructed. I’m terrified to open the engine and see what kind of damage occurred. Hopefully no bent valves but things aren’t looking optimistic. Any help would be greatly appreciated.