Hey all,
Let me lay out my situation:

'81 Vanagon, 2.0L air-cooled, with low compression in #1.  Suspect
dropped valve seat.

I have a spare 2.0L engine that I got when I bought my van.  The engine
is from a parts Vanagon.  Unknown history on the engine, tho I am
waiting for a response from the PO on that subject.

I took the spare engine apart over the past few days and found that the
head I need (right side, 1&2 head) looks pretty darn good.  There was a
bunch of carbon in the combustion chambers and the spark plugs were
fouled with oil.  Probably bad rings.  Note that most surfaces of this
engine were covered in oily grit.  It must have been leaking pretty
well.  After a thorough cleaning things are looking fine.  All valve
seats appear to be in good order, none of the valve stems stick out
higher than any others.  Steve Dolan has also examined this head and
concurs with me that it is probably usable.

My plan is to pull my engine, strip it down to the heads, and exchange
the head from the spare engine for the bad head on my engine.  While
there I plan to replace lots of gaskets and oil seals, but that's
secondary.

My question to you is:  if I go this route, what do I need to do to prep
this head for installation on my engine?  The head appears to be stock,
and I don't see any obvious signs of rebuilding (i.e. no rebuilder's
stamp, etc).  I assume I will need to check/set deck height all the way
'round.  What else do I need to do to make sure this works out?

I'd like any advice from those that have been there, done that.  Advice
on what I need to do to make it work, advice on why I should or should
not do this (as opposed to getting rebuilt heads from AVP or Mark
Stephens), etc.

BTW, disassembling this spare engine, I found that the top of the oil
cooler was pretty much 95% blocked off by blobs of oily grit.  If your
engine appears to be blowing a lot of oil, you may want to clean it up
to avoid this.  It's clear that the oil cooler on this engine wasn't
doing much to cool the oil.

Thanks in advance

Sean Bartnik
Fairfax, Virginia
'81 Vanagon L Westfalia