Land Rover head update

I went ahead and ordered up from Craddocks new valves and valve guides, valve guide seals, injector seals, head bolt kit, rubber plugs for rocker cover. Well, I thought I did anyway. When moving between pages on the website the guides and seals got dropped off and I didn't notice. Now for some reason it takes 2 weeks for Craddocks to process a International order when it used to take 3 days when Penny worked there.
   What's up with that Craddocks?

   So to save time I ordered the guides and seals from Trevor at Rovah Farm.

Locally I researched a machine shop and decided on Santa Cruz Auto Parts ( www.santacruzautoparts.net ). I made the call once all the parts were in and spoke to Dan and confirmed the job was doable. That afternoon I pulled the head and loaded it in the 88 ready for the morning.

Head off, notice no heavy oil;

  So on Tuesday morning I headed down to Santa Cruz after the morning school traffic. I was dropping the head off with Dan and he went about doing his check over and found that the head is cracked in all 4 combustion areas between the valves. So no need to change the guides, I need a new head. F**K!

Here's pics of the cracks after I got it home and cleaned it up real good;

#4

#3

#2, which also shows signs of something getting loose inside and bouncing around.

#1 was the best;

If you go back and look close you can see that there are areas which show overheating with a rough texturing. Also #3 has a raised ridge around it. The head showed some warpage with a straight edge as I expected.

   I brought the POS home and because I was interested I removed the valves from #3, the oily cylinder, just to see what I could discover.

#3 exhaust valve felt fine and the guide wasn't loose, it was however oily under the seal.

Here is looking inside the head behind the valve fairly dry, lots of crud

A look at the guide

The #3 intake valve, note the oil sheen

Inside the head behind the intake valve, note the oil sheen it did not extend up the intake towards the manifold port, So this was likely the problem area.

Now I'm on the hunt for a better head and this is what I'm finding; New heads are pretty rare and costly, most offered are refurbished and want a good exchange head. I think I'm looking at with shipping from the UK somewhere around $1-1.5K for a new and <$1k for refurbished. You can get a 300TDI head for about 1/3 the price and it will bolt on but you have to change pistons also as the piston has the combustion chamber built in and on the 300 it is in a different position as the injectors are located differently.
   To get my head fixed would mean removing the valve seats, grinding the cracks out ,down to the water jacket, welding up the removed portion and machining and re-installing seats then pressure checking the cooling side. If that holds then rebuilding the head, seat grinding, valves, valve guides.......

   I took some cleaner and cleaned off the top of the #2-3 pistons and looked for damage and luckily found none so the bottom end was probably fixed when the glowplug broke( my opinion).

Wish me luck!