I use a wood chisel kept sharpened to a better than razor surface for
gasket removel. This works real well on steel but if you're not careful
it'll scratch aluminium. Also scotchbrite (aka 3M aka plastic wool) pads
with WD40 and carb cleaner work pretty well as long as the gasket isn't
too hard.
Permatex makes a gasket and adhesive remover that they recommend using
before installing new gaskets. I bought some last weekend to use with
the valve cover gaskets on the Chevelle. I ended up not having to use
it for that project (soaking them in Brakleen and rubbing with a soft
brush and coarse paper towels did the trick and didn't remove the paint
on the covers), but I'll try it when I do the head gasket on The Green
Car sometime before summer.
One place you have to be careful is in scraping the top of a block when
you swap the head gasket. You want to get all the old gasket material
off but you don't want to let it get into the engine. A trick for this
is to lay a bead of Vaseline around the edge of the pistons and wipe it
out (along with the crud that falls into the cylinder bores) when you're
done. Any residual Vaseline will burn off fairly quickly in the cylinders
so you don't have to worry about removing every trace of it.
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