Well I ordered myself some new valve seat cutters
The stones is the way I learned in auto tech way back in the early 1990s. I could see not using it every day but every once in a while it could work especially for free LOL! Just for cleaning up seats. For me the thing is, I see that not everyone is doing cylinder heads the machine shops are basically going obsolete or they have their thing they want to do and it may not be cast iron heads etc. . Maybe racers have their thing but keeping an old street car going is different. People say "buy Speedmasters" from what I gather they still need to be sent out, so where is the savings when a street car just needs some freshened up Js or x heads. But my recent experience has been about 500 for machine shop work milled, valve job and the seats cleaned up spring height checked and shimmed etc. plus the cost of the heads as cores so It could be anywhere from 600-800 dollars for a freshened up set of cast iron heads. But my main complaint now is the guy doesn't seem interested he's backed up and I drop my heads off and its months later till I hear anything. The last set i dropped off I waited almost 5 months called and it was like he forgot about them...so its like I don't want to be a bother but if you are gong to forget about the work you have in your shop, I may as well try and do it myself. :)