Mark,

Thanks for your advice on my other post.

Here is the whole story - I had a head gasket that degraded on the passenger side front - it had a small hole about the size of a quarter, and coolant was leaking just slightly. My intent was to pull the head and replace the gasket, but I slipped and the head surface got scratched on the exhaust manifold. It was not warped as it was never in an overheat situation - we bought it new. The machine shop said it was straight to the point of being ok to use. The gasket was original with 156,000 miles on it.

I had the shop basically shave off the scratches out of an abundance of caution. They didn't do any additional work on the head or valve train. the said 0.004" is all it took. Everything fired right up and seems to be running normally.

I followed Haynes and Bentley to the letter and they didn't mention anything about valves, so I did nothing to them. Am I right thinking I should now check the clearance? I am at work, so bear with me if this question is as stupid as it seems, but are the silencers accessible from the top with the shims removed? Can I get at them without pulling the cam? I do still have everything that came with the gasket set.

Thanks for the help. I have never done any valve work, and like my wife says, the car was running fine when I decided to fix it!

Dave