the coolant passages in the block were the head bolts up, when cleaning the gasket material off of the deck do you have to clean out these chambers. on ls1howto.com it doesnt say anything and i have not read anything. i know some stuff fell into these. do i just let it pass or what. they were very hard to get into.

 

If materials got in, then you have to clean it out. You don't want this stuff in your pump.
That is why I use a shop vac in tandem with scraping so any loosened material is sucked right up.

 

I do the same thing.
Shop vac's are awsome during head swaps.

 

I am going to do the same thing when I do mine. We did the same thing on my buddies car....but we got some clear tubing, and used some duck tape to make it work with the shop vac

 

i just started it up and it is getting hot. i am maintaining the coolant and the temp is rising. WTF????

 

it looks like the tstat was giving me crap. now its ok.

 

I just swaped my heads during a cam swap this past weekend. I was unable to prevent the gasket from falling into some of the coolant passages. I am going to do a coolant flush this weekend and run 2 bottles of flush through it. Hope that will clean some of the gunk out.