Need to pull the heads off my 1965 skylark 300 (355) . Looking for advice on the best head and intake gaskets. I'm pulling heads off to be able to remove stubborn broken exhaust manifold bolts, of which I tried soaking, heating, extractors, and finally welding on nuts with no luck. Should I get the heads machined while off, new valves, etc...? I believe I read somewhere I should not put harden seats in since they are hardened already. Should I have the exhaust manifold mating surface trued up as well? Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
Now you have the bolt fairly flush with the head with a hole from the easy-out (extractor) you used. Heres what I would do: continue drilling the hole bigger until you start grazing the threads. Since your hole was not perfectly on-center, you should now have a crescent shaped section of the bolt remaining in the hole. Use a cove chisel to tap the remaining piece of bolt sideways to knock it loose and pick it out with needle nose or tweezers. Clean-up the threads with a tap. They say Buick have enough nickel in them that hardened seats are not necessary, so, I wouldn't bother with hardened seats. If your engine has anywhere near 100K mles on it, I would have the valves reground and maybe resurfeced. Stamped tin head gaskets , which is what the factory used, will give you higher compression than the layered Fel-Pro will. I know there are still gasket kits still out there, a friend just bought one a few weeks ago. Hope it all works out.
Thank you for the help, I'll get started working on those bolts as you outlined. I found two types of metal gaskets - stated as first type only for 1965 and second type for 65-67. Should I go with second type? I see it's recommended to use a spray type permanent on the metal gaskets would you agree. Last question should I go metal or fiber gaskets for the intake?
First type should be for 64 only with aluminum heads. 65-67 have cast iron heads. Only the intake gaskets are different. 64 has water ports where 65-67 have exhaust for warming the intake. Find a shop that has EDM(electric discharge machining) for removing bolts without damaging threads. Eric's Laz-R-Out: EDM METHOD (boltguy.com)
