Are these heads berked?

So quick backstory...

Last weekend I found milkshake on the end of my truck's dipstick. It's a 95 Chevy C1500 with a 5.3 swap that I finished earlier this summer. Luckily I had some time off work this week and notning better to do, so Tuesday I began the exploratory surgery and tore the heads off. Head gaskets look fine, block and heads appear straight, could it be cracked heads maybe? Sure enough, they're the crack prone Castech 706 castings and look to have evidence of a steam lesk near one or more of the bolt holes. 

Wednesday I set off on a head hunting expedition to the junkyard and was pretty thrilled to find a pair of 243 castings under the hood of a Saab 9-7X. Snagged those along with the newer style truck intake manifold, injectors, and a maf sensor for $75.

I was apparently so enthused over my junkyard treasures that I failed to inspect them very thoroughly at the time, and it wasn't until I happened to be at eye level with the intake later that night that a couple large fragments of shrapnel in the plenum caught my attention. Of course I figured this likely meant some garbage got ingested as well, and sure enough the heads showed a bit of damage, mostly on cylinders 3-6, but actually weren't as bad as expected. 

Pics:

So are these salvageable? I'd have to get the milled .030" anyway for my 5.3 as the cumbustion chambers are larger on the 243 castings, which I think would clean up a lot, but probably not all, of the damage on the flat areas of the chambers. That seems to be where most of the damage is concentrated, aside from the last two pics. I'm wondering if I could try to very gently blend those out as best as possible and just send it.

If it's going to take much more than that to save them, if they're not totally junk in the first place, I'll probably just go the easy route and snag another set of heads.

As long as the seats and valves are OK, they're fine to run.

If you're machining .030" off that will clean up a lot of it, but what it doesn't clean up will work anyway. Blending the damage in the chambers won't hurt. I've built a bunch of customer heads with this kind of damage and that's exactly what I did, except I'll usually take .040".

None of that damage is on a gasket sealing surface so polish the sharp edges smooth and run them.  I wouldn't bother milling 243 heads (64cc) for compression to match a 862/706 (61cc).  The bigger intake valves and the better flowing exhaust port in the 243 heads will more than make up for the 0.3 drop in compression ratio. 

Swapping 5.3 pistons out for flat tops out of a 4.8 or gen4 5.3 would be a better way to gain compression and then you don't wind up in machine shop purgatory.

Run a tap down the spark plug hole on the chamber with the bash next to the hole. No need to do anything else.

Those will clean up and look almost new again.

Run them through the dishwasher to see what you really bought.

I would burnish or somehow clean up the gouges, smooth out the edges and on the shallow ones try to round out the bottom.  A sharp edge is a stress concentrator, add intense pressure and volatile fluids .........

Thanks everyone, that's what I was hoping to hear! Valve seats all look fine, and I'm definitely planning to run a tap through that plug hole. 

In reply to RacetruckRon :

I'd think milling them would be worth it, I've already got a mild cam in the motor and would rather not lose any static compression. The 65cc chambers would drop it to about 9.1:1. Plan would be to mill .030" and run a .040" compressed thickness head gasket, which should put it at about 10:1 compression.

I agree that flat tops would have been the better way to go, and I regret not doing that when I had the bottom end apart last winter, but I'd rather not tear into all that again at this point.