You never know how much, if any, damage there is to the head until it's removed. Assuming you're going to remove the head yourself, go ahead and remove it, and if there's bad news, just donate the car.

If your plan is to take the car to a shop, you might be better off donating the car now or selling it as-is with a blown head gasket and be done with it.

Duke

For a frame of reference, my 3.2 inline six DOHC 24 valve head at the machine shop that services the local dealer is running $695.00 with valves and guides extra.

That is for a COMPLETE head job labor? How much are valves and guides on an M103 head?

Not doing the valves will not kill you for 15-25K miles more use, most likely.

Valve related problems can include:

Surfaces of the valves being too thin and as a result getting very hot which can cause them to burn and give you poor (no) compression, also wear in the guides can cause mis-seating which can also cause a valve to burn. The place where they valves meet the head is critical, as valves reach unreal temperatures, and if they cannot dissapate heat through the valve seat evenly, they will DIE.

Deposits on the back of a valve can cause performance issues, as the air/fuel mixture does not travel easily or most completely into the combustion chamber as a result of them.

From a German mechanical or engineering standpoint, at your mileage it would be heresy not to do everything. Your car after all probably needed it a long time ago, even before your overheat, for purposes of durability and efficency.

But in reality, you can probably slide. As duke said, you'll need to pull the head before you know any of it for sure.

must be the mechanical engineering coming out in me. I don't think I've got no German ancestry.

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Jim

Thanks. I'm leaning towards just having the complete head job done as long as it is not insanely expensive. Like I said there are other things wrong with the car, hence the dilemma. If it were just the gasket/head issue, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Right now, I need to get the engine in working order and then tackle all the other issues (minor, but many).