Head Blown
 

I blew out my head gasket........Im just curious on how much this should cost. The quotes I have vary by thousands. Any help would be great.

How easy would it be to fix it myself? also, how much would I be looking at if I did it myself?

The one worry I have for performing a DIY on head gaskets is that whether the cylinder head itself will be fine to re-install. Depending on how bad the car overheated, sometimes the head may warp, in which case machining might be involved or buying a used one (cheaper). This happened with my 86 merkur turbo; I ended up machining the head, but had to use 2 gaskets as the head was trimmed and the compression went up, which is a not good for a Turbocharged car.
Make sure you do the research.

A head gasket set is a little under 200$ for all of the gaskets that you need. It should only take a few hours of labor to take the top of the motor off and put the gasket back in and put the motor back together.

You need to find out if the estimates you are getting are worse case or best case. Like weezer said, if you have other problems with the car it can get very expensive. I would expect any good shop to tell you what the price is if they don't find any problems, and what the price range could be if they get the head off and find that you have other problems than just a gasket.

My headgasket had a slow leak so I had it changed two years ago. It was well under 1000$ without any other problems found in the engine when the head was taken off.

If you pull the head its best to take it to a good engine builder and have the head rebuilt. Your way down the road once the head is off and the shop will ,,, Grind valves (there is a bit of a power bump for not a lot of $$ here..), Replace cam bearings, mill the head flat(Minor power bump), Replace valve springs (Reliability). Clean the head (AL hot tank)

Often the bottom end can be done (main bearings and rod bearings)
by just dropping the oil pan.

Another option, Pull the motor. Its not that hard(Easier than a head replacement in teh vehicle IMHO) and then you take the whole motor in and have it gone through. less than a couple grand and you have a new motor with lots of nice power work done, and its good for another 100K miles.

Talk to some NASA bmw racers in your area, they will know who the "man" is.

Dave.