Its really not difficult to take the head off just time consuming and tedious.

You have to drain coolant, drain oil, remove all the vac. lines, coolant hoses, fuel lines, electrical, exhaust manifold, spark plugs, etc.

Then you have to cut or remove the timing belt (I OJ'ed mine since I was going to redo the timing anyway.) and then take off the VC and loosen and remove the head bolts (and get arps lol).

Make sure everything that is connected to the head is off and don't forget about the bracket under the intake manifold.

After you're 100% positive everything is off pull the head off (I had to actually stand on my car and pull up).

After I did that I examined the head and saw there was knicks on the valves and even worse there was marks on the #2 piston.



Thats what the piston looked like, I'll load what the head looked like when I get back from vaca.