Clint, I just went through this same exercise last Winter. My TO had always burned oil pretty good, had 75-80 PSI compression also. Ran it for years that way. If your TO runs good, and you don't mind pumping cheap oil in her, and cleaning your plugs a lot.... run her. There is not a whole lot more you can do from the outside. I recommend pulling the head, dropping the oil pan, and pulling a piston or two to see what's going on in there. Sounds like a big job, but actually you can tear down that much in a few hours. You can turn your engine head upside down, pour some gas in each cylinder hole, let it set 10-15 minutes to see if your valves are holding tight. Assuming you have a manual, you can check your rings, cylinder, and piston tolerances for wear, look for scoring in the cylinders, etc.I recommend not buy any parts until you have a full scope of your intended work. I started out thinking I would just tinker with a few things, but the deaper I looked, the more I wanted to do. I bought some specific gaskets first, then a lower rebuild kit, then a full gasket set, then a valve rebuild kit, then a water pump, then this, that and another. I had overlapping gaskets from the different sets, and probably spent more money than I needed had I just decided up front what I was going to do, shopped around, and ordered parts once. Good Luck !
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