The cost of a new head gasket has climbed up into the ridiculous zone price-wise.   $35 plus $7.50 shipping is the going rate when this post was written.  

       Ouch.

Do you have to replace it with a new head gasket like everybody says?  NO !!

The head gasket is composed of 3 sheets of thin spring steel sheet metal held together with a rubberized coating over each piece of steel.  The 3 pieces are crimped together around two diagonally spaced large stud holes with a "bend and crimp" style staked crimp.

Head gaskets can sometimes be scraped up in one piece, it looks "all together" and it does not show any separation of the layers.  If so, you are lucky and can reuse it with just a thin coating of silicone gasket maker on the outside surface to provide a new adhesion surface to your cleaned head and barrel castings.

Life gets more fun if the layers have separated -- this happens because the layers ARE NOT FLAT as they have formed lip edges to the outer two sheets which makes them go concave/convex naturally.  Now you gotta deal with individual sheet metal plates as the silly thing wants to "explode" on you naturally.

Take a dremel tool with a stone tip and grind off the four little locking tabs on each of the two diagonal holes.   Do not fight to separate the plates if some rubber is still holding them together, we will shortly deal with the rubber using acetone as a solvent.

Get a large covered corningware dish from the kitchen that the plates will lie flat on the bottom of it.   Get a can of Brake Parts Cleaner (acetone) and spray the gasket liberally until there is a pool of acetone in contact with at least the bottom plate.  Put the lid on to allow the acetone vapor pool to develop inside the corning ware and watch the rubber start to curl up as you look through the clear top.  

(don't breathe in this nasty stuff -- you won't get high any at all, you'll likely just lose a few more IQ points per each sniff you take)

Plates separated, rubber curling up nicely, take the corningware over to the sink and find where you wife keeps the little brass lathe turnings Kurly Kate pot scrubber thingie.   Turn the water on to a thin stream of warm and lay one of the plates flat on the bottom of the sink and scrub off all the rubber under the running water -- it comes right off and the tiny little strands of rubber go right down the drain.  Do this to all sides on all 3 plates, returning any tough rubber spots back into the pool of acetone in the corningware if they need a little more soak time.

Now, commit an act of ecological vandalism and dump all the acetone down the drain and wash everything out with some hot soapy water and rinse out the sink with the little sprayer thingie.

Be sure to put everything back where you found it and when she asks what you were doing in her kitchen and what smells so funny just say you were cleaning some parts in the sink .....

Look at the plates.  One is simple flat (it goes in the middle) and the other two are formed with lips that are oriented bump side out.

At assembly time lightly coat each side of each plate with a finger smear of your favorite silicone gasket maker, stack them over the studs and locator hollow dowel pins IN THE CORRECT ORIENTATION and bolt 'er up.  Flat plate in the middle, bump side goes out on the bottom and top plates.  Do this wrong and the head gasket won't work ....

The silicone will provide the same sealing function as the original rubberized coating and the actual compression seal that keeps the hot combustion gases contained comes from the spring steel tension in the formed bump lips that are now all mashed pretty much flat by your stud torque.

Recovering your gasket plates takes about an hour of fiddle time with the dremel and the acetone and the Kurly Kate scrubbing in the sink, so one way to think of it is you saved yourself $35 plus $7.50 shipping and a whole week of waiting for a new gasket to ship in by spending a little sink time playing with your wife's kitchen stuff.