Endeavor to persevere.

After some bad news yesterday I decided to move on.  Some guys on the forum I've been reading looked at the photos of my pistons and said they didn't look too good, how 'bout giving us some pix af the cylinders, and I did and they thought those looked pretty rough as well, and said that they probably needed at least to be honed, if not bored.
So I heard what I didn't want to hear, but I guess it was something that I needed to know.  Funny how often what you want and what you need don't converge. 
Anyway, I spent the morning rearranging tools to make a better work area and this afternoon I started degreasing the engine.  And I found some good news.  Don't know it it off-sets the bad but good is good, right?  The manual had some pretty simple tests for some of the components.  For example: place the head on a flat surface like a sheet of heavy glass to see if it is warped...passed that.  Also:  put some gas in the dome where the valves are to see how fast the liquid leaks back out to see if the valves are seating properly...passed that.  The solvent I put in there to disolve the carbon build up stayed there for hours (once the spark plugs were back in place.)  So that's good.

Below right is an excellent picture of degreaser not leaking from the cylinder dome.  Since it isn't a video I guess you'll just have to take my word for it that it's not leaking, because it's not.