Spent most of yesterday and today replacing the head gaskets, intake manifold gasket, and re-assembling the whole shebang back together, with new head bolts. Silly thing was I had marked the distributor orientation on the intake manifold with white-out, but then washed off that mark when I cleaned the oily gunk off the manifold, heads etc with kerosene. So it would not start at first, until I played with the ignition timing until it did start and I was able to set it properly (spout connector removed).
I reset all the valve lashes while it was all open, some were out a bit, one a lot. Took a 7/16 inch socket rather than metric for some reason. All the plugs looked fine and so did the combustion chambers, valves, and pistons. One cylinder wall had some light scoring. Don't know if it's the original engine (only bought it in October 2019) but the truck does have 235K miles on it. The heads have been off before, the old gaskets were the exact same Fell pro I used.
After I got the ignition timing set, and the coolant system filled up, the engine ran good, although it seems to be re-setting the idle (it's sorta high, say 1,100 rpm, then drops one second to the next to around 650 rpm which is too low). Until I got the coolant topped off it started running rough as the engine temp climbed, and I got a 'check engine' light briefly but after getting almost another gallon of coolant into the system, it seems to be settling in ok.There's a small exhaust leak at one (or both) of the manifold-to-downpipe connections that I hope to seal up after it has all cooled down, tomorrow. No coolant in the oil filler neck so far, but it was only a 5 mile test (and beer) run, so only time will tell if I actually fixed the coolant leak, after all of that work. It did take me two solid days, but only $156 in parts, so not bad in the out-of-pocket department (not counting the oil and filter change I also did, just to make sure there was no coolant left in the engine). BTW I found I had to also remove the AC compressor and alternator, just to get at things and be able to take the heads off. Also, when removing the exhaust manifolds, two of the bolts snapped off, so that took time drilling out the bolt remnants and tapping in new threads, getting new bolts at hardware store, etc.
Fingers crossed the coolant leak is fixed and the idle settles back to where it should be. I really love this Bronco II truck. There was a procedure somewhere on re-setting the idle, may have to look for that.