Hey bro,
Nice to see your project still coming along. I just wanted to jump back in to ask if you degree'd or at least measured your cams/lift to because of your vct elimination. I finally got around to fixing mine. Because the range of the VCT is something like 0-45/50 degrees advance (crank degrees) you need to advance the intake by the same amount or so depending where you want it. I can tell you that if you leave it at default with just the bar you will make peak torque near redline lol. And max advance on my adj gear only got it halfway hence why I needed to fix it more.. but anyway.. I fixed it by just advancing the sprocket/cam 3 teeth and then using the adj cam gear to fine tune. idk what is better 2 teeth and more advance with the adj gear or what I did and 3 teeth and retard with the adj gear. And if you are doing measurement with a dial indicator on cam followers be sure to factor in the angle you take your measurement at. Anything over 10 degrees needs correction which is just about any position you can manage to get a dial indicator set up. There is just no room to get a good vertical reading and the valves are already at an angle so its a little tricky. Google cosine error to learn more about it. It will make a big difference to what you set your motor at. Ex. for our turbo cams 0.1043305" of lift at TDC intake would read 0.1564" on the indicator so if you just go by the gauge reading your cam will still be retarded a bit.
Just thought I'd share this piece of information before you get it all started up!