Hi, sorry for the delay in replying to your responses. Thanks Freelance for the tip on the oil seals, the manual does say fit dry but doesn't give a reason which I did think strange considering I've always been told the opposite.
When I say another, I meant I have rebuilt several K series engines in the past with varying degrees of success. These were before MLS gaskets using elastomer head gaskets. Interestingly this engine (year 2000) has been rebuilt previously before I bought it, I believe within the last year, and whoever did the work fitted plastic dowels??? I fitted steel dowels and couldnt get the head to fit, 3 hours later and some nervous decisions it went on and it was 1 in the morning, hence the delay in replying.
The previous builder had also used an elastomer gasket and now Im wondering if replacing the antifreeze with O.A.T. antifreeze instead of ethylene glycol based antifreeze didnt help, there is a O.A.T. yellow ring on the header tank but it did have ethylene glycol antifreeze in it originally.
mixing the antifreeze shouldn't have affected the gasket, more the mixing or lack of.
May have been k-seal chucked in, not ideal, fine for a roadside fix for a rad leak but by no means permanent solution.
I was probably one of the first DIY fixers to use the MLS gasket, released in Mar 06, my hgf ran from Feb to Jun when the FL was used as a daily runner, before fitting in Jul 06
The steel dowels were less than precise, one fitted loosely, the other needed about 0.15mm machined off it, even that was a rough sanding down.
The dowels get a lot of blame for head shuffle, personally I think they are just guides for lining the head to the block. Powertrain (RIP) used steel dowels then switched to plastic ones, as they were ruining heads with scratches during the assembly line.
The head bolts should hold the head, combined with the higher bond area of the MLS gasket.
If you are removing the head with cams in-situ then each cam has to be rotated independently to access the head bolts.
I removed mine, sealed the mating face with an oil soluble sealant. Around 2yrs later I had the cam carrier off again, re-sealing it with a RTV silicone compound. She is bone dry since.
Robots applied the sealant in powertrain, that explains why they leaked from early mileage, the sump was exactly the same.
Use a RTV compound spread out very thinly, just as though you were applying a coat of gloss paint, job done
