Looking for advice: I've got to put new head gaskets on someone's 1997 Ford Ranger, it has 2 heads and 6 cylanders; can I pull those heads without messing up the timing? I don't want to have to remove the engine, remove the timing chain covers etc to do the timing.

In the past when I did this on a car I thinking I managed to carefully remove and replace head without having to check the timing marks

 

Your '98's camshaft stays in the block when you remove the heads.
This job on the SOHC engine (which came afterwards) requires timing hardware separation.