Made a bit more progress over this past weekend.  Picked up an engine stand and got the motor mounted up to it, removed the intake manifold and painted it, and also cleaned up the intake ports / sealing surfaces on the intake side of the heads.

Cleaned up intake ports / sealing surfaces after removing the intake manifold.  I'll clean it more thoroughly once I remove the heads to replace the lifters/trays but this will suffice for now. 

Backside of one of the intake valves.  They all looked like this - pretty clean.

Getting ready to lift the engine to install on the engine stand.

Mounted up.  Now I'll have 360 access to everything on the engine.  Had to upgrade the handle to a long ass piece of pipe because there's no bearings to provide for easy rotation - I have to fight the friction generated by the weight of the engine.

With the engine mounted up now I started prepping the intake manifold for paint.  Removed fuel rails and injectors:

Then I sanded the manifold down with #220 grit to give the paint something to stick to. 

Paint!  VHT High Temp Wrinkle Black

Starting to dry:

I applied three coats of paint in varying directions, waited about 20 minutes, then used a heat gun to tighten up the microstructure of the textured finish.  You can see the difference between the textures below:

Before heat gun:

After heat gun:

Finished:

And a teaser shot of it on the engine.  The valve covers will be painted to match it.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  Stock-ish appearance, just dressed up a bit.  Next time I won't wait as long to start going over it with a heat gun, I think the sun took away some of my working time and some spots having a tighter texture than others.