I did check the waterways and apart from a tiny bit of crust around the edges all was good, in fact it's just about the cleanest system I've seen.
Just as it dried out, didn't use anything to clean it before I took the pic, just made sure I used plenty of antifreeze in the past.
I got the head back from the skimming place on Friday afternoon so set about grinding the valve in and re-building
Nice and shiny
A couple of the seats needed a bit more than a grind so I dug out this bad boy
It didn't make much of an impression on the hardened seats but by placing a disc of emery cloth over the cutter the seat eventually came good. This one had a nasty nick in it but after a half hour with the cutter/emery it was fine.
When I was happy with the seats it all went back together
I made a valve compressor out of a G clamp . A dab of grease held the collets in place
Then tested the seal with parrafin
All done
As suggested in the Rapier mods article I didn't go mad with the ports, just cleaned then up and removed any edges and roughness
Plonked on and torqued up
And finally all done, remember Tim's monster inlet manifold
So after an oil and filter change and fill up with coolant he fired up no problem

I didn't go mad on the test run but results are positive. Not a huge difference but Harvey was pretty sprightly any way, the main gains seen to be mid range torque. Pulling from 50mph in OD top produced a nice surge to 70, not push you into the seat surge, but a noticeable improvement and it does want to go but I'll wait to get a few miles on, re-adjust the valve clearances then maybe give it some and see what happens

The main reason the head was off in the first place was because of the gasket problem, happy to report that minimal pressure build up in the rad even when the lekky fan cuts in at 94 degC, just the little pop you would expect when undoing the cap - result
