[cleszkie]

The "lifter chatter" under load you hear is most likely pinging caused by too much advance in your timing. The black smoke is unburned fuel (white = water, blue = oil, black = gas). You are running very rich. Sounds like you have some tuning of the distributor and carb to do.

If you have any sort of oil baffles in the new valve covers, they should be adequate to keep the PCV valve from sucking in oil. So apparently this is not the cause of your massive oil consumption. Have you performed a compression test on all the cylinders? It sounds like you may be pressurizing your crankcase with cylinder blow-by. This will cause all the crankcase seals to leak under this added pressure. A compression test on the cylinders will tell you if you are having sealing issues in the cylinders possibly attributed to bad rings or valves.