hello from NC

Hi from the NC mountains.  I have a 99 Sport 4.0 SOHC.  I am hoping to find the answers to my Sport's problems here.  I had a rat decide to eat the wires on the coolant temp sensor wires and I had to remove the intake to fix the problem.  Well, everything is back together, tools and hardware all accounted for.  Well when I started it up, there is a rattle that increases with the rpm's.  It ran fine before the rat and now all of the sudden a terrible rattle.  The rattle sounds like it is in the front, rear, top, bottom, left and right.  No check engine light, the gauges are all normal.  The only problem I know for certain I have is the idler pulley.  I did take the belt off to see if it was an accessory rattle, but it wasn't.  Tried a stethoscope on all the cyclinders, couldn't find it.  I did a compression check on all the cyclinders and all was fine.  Please help, I'm running out of options on getting this running and I don't have the 600.00 for new timing chains.  My only other option in to pull a 4.0 Pushrod out of my 92 with 54,000 miles on the motor and swap everything to the OBD 1 not the OBD II.  Any help on that would be appreciated if I can't fix my SOHC.  Thanks in advance