Ok everyone...thank you all. I managed to finally get the valve stem out after about 20+ hours!! Number 1.....the damn stem is NOT magnetic!! What I did was remove the exhaust headrs and bingo! I could see the stem right there through a large enough opening to fit a pair niced sized needle nose pliers and push it right up through the guide. Once I got it through the guide I had a friend rotate the crank to push the piston up so that it would not fall again. I was able to change out all 12 valve seals. I did not complete the reassembly yet however, but hopefully the rest is simple depending on what input you all have for me. 1.) Since we rotated the crank manually via 27mm socket, will that throw off the "timing" or anything??? 2.) There were 2 types of seals a larger one (Red) and a smaller one (Green) see pics below. My question is that when I took the oringinal ones off, I'll say brown (on the left) and black (on the right) see pic below, they looked identical except for the flat top (brown) and dome top (black). The dome top (black) was on the spark plug side, and the flat top (brown) was on the intake side so the way I put them on was I replaced all the dome top (black) ones with all the green ones and I replaced the flat top (brown ones) with all the red ones, does that sound about right? sorry for the confusion.

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1990 190E 3.0L