Actually the real expert to talk to would be Bob Walker over at Hot Hemi Heads.

Been one of those long days here so I may not being understanding your question properly, but I'm going to assume that you are talking about .000 as a 0 deck height (i.e. the top of the piston being level with the block deck at TDC). If this is the case you might want to read


http://www.rbracing-rsr.com/squishcalc1.html

Which will basically tell you in paragraph 4 that quench does not really apply to Hemi heads.

My 331 has a negative deck height and my 354 is running a positive deck height. The driving factor as it applys in this case isn't what the deck height is ( + or - ) but rather effectively what that deckheight does in reguard to the COMPRESSION RATIO. Your 2 main concerns when building this engine should be final compression ratio and secondly valve to piston clearance with the cam your going to be running.

I know you posed the question to Denny in regards to if it's worth rebuilding or not, but I'll take a shot at the answer too. What you do is up to you, but I personally, if I had a set of .030 over pistion and 7 cylinders that cleaned up at that and one that didn't I'd have a sleeve put in the bad cylinder (usually around $100-$150).

It's your decision on what you spend, but as I brought up more than a few times there is no such thing as building one of these on a budget. As expensive as they are to build you have to much tied up in them by the time you get them running to cut corners and have them blow up because you "saved" a few buck here and there by being a penny pincher.