General advice, if you're not comfortable with where all the wires and tubes go, get yourself some tags which you can tie to everything with a description of where it plugs into - makes it all a lot less hit and miss
Also get a nifty little box with compartments for all your nuts and bolts, and stick a note in each compartment telling you what the nuts and bolts are for. Really does help.Right, here goes:
Replace everything with new head gasket and head bolts. If you don't know when the last time your timing belt and water pump were changed, I really do advise doing them while you're at it.. I recently made the mistake of believing my waterpump to be fine and not in need of replacement, and ended up with the cam belt guide ring snapping off and the belt trying to burrow it's way through the engine.. not good. Don't be tempted to re use the head bolts, you'll realise when you undo them quite how tight they are on there and they've been that tight for many, many years - it puts a lot of strain on them, they lose their elasticity, they become brittle and they're likely to snap / come loose if re used.. leaves you with a very unpleasant mess for the sake of £10 worth of bolts.Unplug HT leads and any electro-trickery on the manifold / throttle body (inlet manifold and a couple of wires on the mk2, will be different for the mk3 but not enormously I shouldn't think)
Remove fuel lines and similar from carb/throttle body - anything connecting it to the rest of the car.
Remove the exhaust clamp/unbolt the exhaust downpipe, release it from the manifold.
Loosen the camshaft sprocket bolt - easiest way to do this is stick it in gear and use a breaker bar against it, but I'd definately advise replacing the cambelt if you do this, you have to put a lot of strain on it. Otherwise you'll have to make up a tool to hold the wheel in place through the holes in the sprocket.. although I've cracked a sprocket trying to do this so be careful...
Loosen the water pump bolts and turn it anticlockwise as viewed from the timing belt end of the engine. Easiest way to do this is take a breaker bar or similar and a mallet, rest one end of the breaker bar on the far side of the pump and tap sharply with the mallet to get the pump moving anticlockwise (as viewed from timing belt end of the engine). You'll need to give it a fairly solid tap to get it loose, but after that it'll start turning easier.
Remove the cambelt and the cambelt sproket from the head.
Loosen and remove the head bolts in the sequence that haynes manual gives - keep to that sequence or you'll risk warping the head.
The head can now be lifted off along with both manifolds, distributer etc that haynes tells you to remove. It's a good idea to take them off anyway and replace the gaskets, but that's pretty much optional if you're doing an emergency head gasket change. Does only take a couple of minutes and the gaskets are cheap, so I would advise doing it unless you're really sure of their condition.
As usual, let me know if I've missed anything, if it's been helpful, unhelpful, decidedly average, whatever.. as I said, I wrote this a few months ago and just decided to edit/relocate it as a few people have been asking about head gaskets since then.
