Well I finally got everything pulled apart last night. I drained the oil and at first thought, maybe it's not too bad. I pulled the passenger side head and it looks pretty gross and like it's not a problem that developed recently. If this thing had 77K miles on it then it was rough. Each stud into the block looks rusted and with the block still in the car there's more rust than I'd hoped pooled up at the bottom. What I thought might be a top end job looks like it'll be at least a rehone before cleaning up and piecing back together. At that point I may as well replace the bearings and rings too. 

 

Finally someone had cross threaded the spark plug in the passenger front cylinder (1 right). I haven't looked too close, but what are my options to fix that? Rethread for a slightly larger plug or is repair of the thread possible? That's not like the most exciting thing if it means I need a new head. 

Thread repair kits are available for spark plugs.

I got it pulled out and if I can clean up some of the rust goop pooled at the bottom then the bores really don't look too bad. On the driver side I can still see a decent cross hatch pattern. I may be able to pull of just cleaning it up a bit and putting in the new gasket. 

The coolant had pooled and rusted a bit on the passenger side and so the bore there is a little bit rougher. I tried sanding a little with some super fine grain paper, but it didn't really make a dent. I'm assuming just running it should cause the rings to wear that back down and smooth it out. I don't really want to strip it out and re-hone right now. If I go down that route I'd want to do the bearings and rings, etc. 

 

After pulling the engine and taking everything apart, I found that the coolant system overall had failed tremendously. The water pump had failed and was bleeding out the pinhole on the bottom side, the thermostat area was really gunked up, but overall the HG on the passenger side was my culprit. Some HG material had even sucked up against the strainer for the oil pump. I took a wire brush to the studs and cleaned up the threads and hopefully later tonight I'll be able to start putting it back together. I'm still eyeballing the EA81 in Penn, but this will at least get me back on the road. 

It's pretty easy, relatively, to pull the wrist pins and pop the pistons out.  No need to mess with the "bottom end" rod and main bearings.

 

then you can more thoroughly clean or even lightly bottle hone the cyls.

 

and either replace, or simply clean out the dried burnt oil from the oil control rings.