I bought a $300 blown head gasket that was surrounded by a free offroad luxury vehicle. It's a D2, 4.0, 132k hard top. It came with no history, but a clean title.

I tore into it and found a 'balooned' valley pan, so clearly something bad happened.. Yikes, right?



And then there was lots of radiator fluid in the cylinders but a lot of it came out of the heads when I pulled them. However, the fluid in 7&8 was a bit Rusty. It'd be odd for both head gaskets to go wouldn't it?

So my options:
1. Hope all is good, buy a gasket and bolt kit and button it up for a few hundred bucks.

2. Lift​​​Lift out the block and take it to the local machine shop. They quoted $2500 for short block work including bottom gasketed top hat liners.

3. Pick up a new long block from Turner, which I can (begrudgingly) afford at the moment.

Thoughts?