I'm commiserating with ya.
I took a second cut off the head on my HAMBster a few years back, and she spun fine. Took'er to the strip, and when she warmed up she bent some valves, breaking a timing set in grand fashion. I didn't pick up on it (I thought I'd screwed up on the woodruff key), so replaced the timing set, and promptly shafted another timing set. This time my buddy spotted the bent pushrods (turned out I'd also slightly tipped over a couple valves), and figured it out. We had to cobble things back together to get'er to flame'er & run back onto the trailer. He hammered the pushrods straight again while I diddled yet another timing set in (I straightened the valves at home later).
The kicker is that my buddy did such a good job of straightening the pushrods, using the corner of my trailer as an anvil, right there in the wind and dust at Eagle Field, that I'm still running all of it three years later.
