69 thou is 'high mileage' for a 235, be really really rare for one to survive to 169 thou ... you should get a shop to work the head, if you've found something actually wrong with it, although that might be the death of the lower end, so it'd be best to do the whole thing .... but if it's not frozen, get it running, sounds like you'll be needing that $500 just to get it running as-is and modify things to make it fit a truck that wasn't designed for it
Bill
