Stud question
 

This may be a stupid question, but I'm curious if you took one bolt out a put a stud in torqued it and did them all like that would it affect anything since technically you be breaking any seals open, it would have the pressure from all the other bolts still there. So has anyone tried this or have any thoughts on it?

it should be totally fine to do it that way, you wouldn't be the first person to do it

curious as to what you are doing to ask the question.

Just thinking ahead to when I go to make more horsepower but also kind of being lazy lol and don't feel like buying all the seals and stuff to just stud the block

I just did this for my S5 Turbo II 13BT. There's no reason why you shouldn't... Just use Black RTV and buy new Mazda seal washers. The studs should be torqued to something like 3-5 ft-lbs and the nuts I went down to 50 ft-lbs. Took me an hour to add a fuckton of reliability to the block... Turblown studs looked great. Glad I went with them.

Your options are:

Turblown
Elite Rotary
FR Performance (Abel Ibarra)

Price range should be ~$400 for all factory fitting studs.

what about the goopy performance studs?

Done it a few times on other cars. Once on my car after I stretched some threads. Also, you don't need RTV at all if you clean correctly

True, but I'd rather be safe than sorry on this. Everything was spotless and prepped with degreaser, and another alcohol based shop solvent I got my hands on.

Aaron, it'll be a pleasure to kick it with you and talk cars at the BorgWarner Booth next week. Hope you're well.