I have mentioned the problems I discovered when I took my 540” hemi apart late last year. Basically I couldn’t keep oil in it. Problems discovered included: double the piston to wall clearance that Diamond recommended, Cylinder wall wall finish? Was horrible, valve guides with as much as .007” clearance etc.
Early on I fought intake gasket problems. Oil was actually coming THROUGH the gasket. I solved that with Superformance gaskets but still didn’t trust the sealing arrangement with only .190” between the bolt hole and edge of port with the 1/4-20 bolts.
I liked the idea of a Viton “O” ring but couldn’t find a shop in my area that did the machining.
I sell tooling for a living and one of my customers offered to help. We decided that we only had room for .090” O ring. After creating an exact duplicate of the intake surface our of aluminum plate, my customer wrote a program and tested it.
I picked the heads up Friday and am pleased with the results. The seal stays in the groove even when rubbing my hand over it, and gives me the .030” stand off that I need for port alignment.
If you live in the south east and want this done, PM me, we already have the program written

After waiting 8 weeks, the pistons are finally in from Diamond. I think it was worth the wait. I was very selective in choosing the shop to do the work. I am confident that this shop will correct the problems I had. After all, Alan Johnson used them on his Pro Stock engine, so that is as good a recommendation as I could find!
Here are the pistons.

I sure wished that I had my heads grooved. It was just so expensive to send them to Canada to have it done. Yours look great.

Thanks, and now you don’t have to go to Canada!

Looks great keep us posted on how it all pans out Hemi Rag !

Looks great! Hopefully this will solve your issues.
Love the intake O-rings...very tempting. My heads are currently sitting on the table...been waiting a month for head gaskets from Cometic. Should be here this week and I'm under the gun to get it back together and tested for some upcoming shootouts.
If I had more time I'd be interested.