Quick "what would you do" SBC question

[Roc87]

About 3 years ago I started building my elky, I wanted a TPI 350 in it and found a decent donor 400 miles away (Actually donor was in better shape than the camino was to start with) I drove the 88 GTA back from Colorado and it got 24mpg and just seemed to have a strange idle, I figured it was a vacuum leak. I fought myself for wanting to at least do a cam and clean up the heads, after cleaning up the engine and some powdercoating, I put it in "stock". After 16k miles of driving it, and wondering why it always seemed to have a cooling issue and chasing the idle issue, I had a carbon monoxide test done on the antifreeze and found a blown headgasket!!!

Sorry for the novel... But I can't really decide what to do with it... Should I just pull the heads and have a 3-way valve job done on them and do some mild port/polish work to them and re-assemble mostly stock again, or get some aftermarket heads, ported/polished, a high flow TPI base port matched to the heads and a ZZ9 cam and if I end up doing that, should I go ahead and pull the motor to have new rings/bearings put in? There isn't any water in the oil and still has about 18# of oil pressure at idle.. It even passed emissions about 6 months ago! It's usually my DD and always seem to need to haul something with it, so I don't want it down for a month.

Or should I just "Man up" and get the credit card out and find a LS1? LOL

 

["Turbo-T"]

How many miles on engine? Bottom end might be ok. Are you looking for more power? If so the head upgrade would probably net you a good increase.

The LS1 would be cool but you're in for some work. I'd almost opt for a fuel injected roller cammed 400 sbc.