Amen Guys!  I'm new to the street bike world, but what you're saying about tools and knowledge has been true for many years.  People shy away from it, but it's really not that hard if you do your homework ahead of time.  Always done my own mechanic work on cars, trucks, machinery, etc.  Plan to do the same when I get my Savage.

Nope, you don't have to remove the head to do this stuff, just the cover.  

All the cover screws come out freely but one, and that one is pretty short.

I wanted to give an update on my status. A friend of mine allowed me to shack up the bike in his garage this weekend to conduct the work. I've dug into the engine and sure enough the head cover came off the engine without much hassle, proving that sure enough shops are often times full of 'BS' or too afraid to do work not by the manual. I remember even telling the shop owner "make sure you put sealant on..." only to be cut off by "yeah we'll do the work right". Well as we all know, by them manual doesn't mean proper work.

Anyways, I got my hands dirty, dug into it, and with the help of the knowledge here and my Clymers I got to the plug and replaced it. Re assembly is tomorrow. As a bonus I got the satisfaction of working on it myself. My roommate rebuilt his GS 500 that he recently laid down next to me. Quite a satisfying satisfying Saturday for a couple of young guys to tear up a garage that doesn't belong to them.

Kudos to all the guidance and encouragement from this forum along the way. Feels good to tear into something that the fancy rich pants mechanical engineers at this school wouldn't be able to identify on an AutoCAD drawing.   Now if only I could steal his wholey goodness it's late of a girlfriend I better wrap this post up and get to bed to finish the job tomorrow.