Following this chat a bit from the sidelines, I see where it may have gone off the tracks - one of the biggest downsides to text conversations.

The question about selling the car, I believe, came from the point of view of your long term plans for it to gain an understanding as to how much time and money you wanted to invest.

That's when things took a turn. If so, then please do not take offense. There are many of us talking from experience about just making top end repairs to an engine and then finding out the hard way afterwards it was a bad choice.

That said, some of the advice above about a leak-down test and perhaps a compression test, would provide the info needed as to whether a head rebuild by itself is the wise choice.

I back up my comments from above with another bad choice my brother and I did on his old Mustang II 4-banger. He got a remanufactured head, we bolted it on and went for a test drive. By the time we got back from that drive, we had completely destroyed a piston rod bearing due to the increase in compression.