Man, it's been a while on this one... I decided to go the route of lash caps to address the nicked up stems I had. Originally I was just going to put the caps on and reassemble it seeing that compression was good everywhere but cylinder #4. I started noticing little specs of sand from when I blasted it a while ago though so I decided to take all the valves out and make sure everything was clean. I had trouble getting the small (inside) springs out, I literally unscrewed one of those springs from the stem seal. The seals were enormous compared to what came in my gasket set. I didn't know what to make of it so I replaced all of them with the ones that came in my gasket set. Lapped the valves too. Everything is cleaned up real good and torqued down to spec. One note about the lash caps. If you decide to go that route, you'll want to shorten your valve stem by the thickness of your lash cap. If you don't, your tappet will not land square on the cap. It is mentioned here by someone (Mrieck?) to shorten the stems, but I chose not to do so. Now I understand why I should have done it. I'm going to go with it for now, everything is torqued back down to spec. No trouble at all getting it back together. I was surprised how easy it really was.