Glad you guys are able to make this happen, Dan's a great guy .Yep and that is awesome and I certainly could figure it out alone...but why would I do that when someone can show me and point to things and say look here and do you hear that? YouTube and Forums are nice but a real person is priceless.
Personally I'd do a base gasket delete and a muffler mod. The base gasket in your pictures showed that the gasket was covering the ports a bit, I would at least trim any excess of to increase flow, but deleting it altogether will gain you a nice bump in compression/ timing/ and power, and a muffler mod will add a bit more.
I think you'll be very pleased at the route you decided to go. Looking forward to hearing how it all goes.