hylomar just isnt sticky enough, I'm afraid I'll get the engine together only to find a pinched seal. Is there anything else I can use? I've read others use superglue on some small parts because it burns off when the engine heats up, what about that?

 

Let me guess... non-stock seals? The all orange Teflon encapsulated ones?

Try slightly stretching them by hand. Only stretch a little bit.

 

I used blue RTV silicone to fill in some mild pits inside the coolant seal tracks when installing my teflon encapsulated silicon O rings during engine assembly. It was stickier than the Hylomar (which I still haven't found a good use for) and held the O rings in place while I stacked the engine together. The engine appears to use little to coolant and has 3000 miles on it now. If only I could say the same for oil - I have some kind of leak because I _didn't_ use RTV silicone sealant on the front cover and used some Permatex brown junk instead.

 

no superglue.

use some kind of hi temp regular RTV. I use permatex ultra black on all my engines, it does very well.

Note that if coolant seals refuse to stay in place, it is either because a) the groove is contaminated with water or oil, or b) the groove is still dirty and needs to be cleaned better.

 

He he, you must have rebuilt an engine or two to in your day.

 

Everybody has to learn sometime, thankfully my training days were long ago

 

yep, they're the orange ones from RWS.
the problem as I see it is the O rings are formed round, and the housing is of course oval, so the orings want to bow out a little bit in the middle, pulling on the four "corners"
I hate to pull the front rotor housing off again, but it beats the crap out of pulling an engine out.

the grove is pretty clean, I've soaked it with degreaser, oven cleaner, and finally scraped the crap out of it.

how much RTV do you use? just a bead around the edge lke hylomar?

 

Are we talking about the big oval one or the little round ones?

 

coolant seals, small oval

 

use petroleum jelly

plain n simple

 

I used hylomar, the stuff seamed to work fine. It gets pretty tacky after it sits there for a little while.