weird..engine too stiff?

I replaced my cars cylinder head last winter, it had few cracks and was leaking oil. When i was trying to manually rotate the engine to adjust the markings for the belt, i allmost could'nt do it with normal wrench, that's how stiff it was. The sparkplugs were dismounted, so no pressure in cylinders. Had to put it on 3rd gear and push the car to rotate . Is it normal? The engine runs fine and smooth, allthoug it has weird extra noises and blue smoke on high revs over 4500rpm. Guess i have to check the cylinder head again. Damn. Can you folks manually rotate your engine easily?

If you cannot rotate it easy then the crank bearings are too tight because you don't have the right clearance.
Try to check the pistons , the piston rings, and the cranck bearings.

Actually it seems to be the cylinder head too hard to rotate. Had the head done this winter and after i mounted the camshafts again, it became allmost impossible to rotate again. Checked crank aswell, changed bearings and pistonrings and it's rolling really easy.

The head was stiff allright. The camshaft mountings were in the wrong order. They wear differently, so they shold be in the same order as before removing. Besides the previous owner had replaced the original cams with KR ones. Studied the internet a bit and installed back the original ACE cams. KR cams, i hear, kill the torque at lower revs and give some effect at about 6500-7000 rpm. Nobody drives like that on daily driver. I know i dont.